I'm on the night train

The hanging monestary and tourists.
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Ok, it's been a while since i have written and I am way past these locations, but I will do a quick update and throw in some pictures. I left Beijing with Hurley and we went to Datong. We slept on the night train, which is always amusing because you either get to talk to lots of locals (or not talk to them, more gesture and pretend like you're saying the chinese words from your little book properly while they laugh at your failure, good naturedly of course) or you talk to other travelers and have the same conversation you have with all new travelers that you meet. Goes like this:

This statue, carved into the cliff face, used to be covered by a cave. It fell away to expose this 40 foot beauty.
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"Hi. Where are you from?"

always somebody snorting, snoring, sneezing, or crying

"Where are you going?"

"Where have you been?"

This shows a small portion of the sequence of caves housing all the Buddhas.
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"Oh. I have/haven't been there. It was cool/ was it cool?"

And so on and so forth. I tried for a while to not have this conversation, but it's impossible to avoid and an immediate way to connect with other travelers. All of whom you meet, become friends with, and seperate from in short order. Usually 2-3 days at most (though I hung with Hurley for 10 or 11).

Ok so Datong was amazing, of course. We hoped on a tour bus, right of the train, for a 2 hour ride through the Chinese steppe lands with some nice folks from New Zealand (Hi Ross and Melinda). During the day we saw the Hanging monestary and Yungang caves. The monestary was totally cool, though super toursity and over crowded. Which is totally freaky because it's hundreds (thousands?) of years old and it literally hangs from a cliff where monks (monks, not monkeys) dug deep holes in them 100's of feet in the air and then inserted support beams. The beams are large and well embedded, but I have to think that the thousands upon thousands of toursists that walk through this structure on a daily basis have got to take a toll (and some day the thing is going to fall down, how can it not?). Once I stopped thinking about this I was able to enjoy the view and architecture.

Heres the great group of people I spent the day with.
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Our next stop was to caves where huge (30-70 feet) Buddhas are carved right into the side of the cliff. Words cannot express the devotion it took to carve literally thousands of Buddhas into these cliff faces. Pictures will have to suffice, though they don't.

I better try to load pictures now because it takes a while and I think that they are closing soon.

The best part of this whole day (yes it was only one day) was the 4 young ladies, Chinese law students, that I met on the bus who helped me with my Chinese (hi Yang Sheng Yue, Zhang Ping, Li Danming, and Chen ZhongJing). We spent most of the time laughing at my bad Chinese and their passable English. I gave them English names and they gave me a Chinese name (Huang Xue Wa) which apparently has a number of meanings, but that day it meant "son of emperor snow boy", though others have told me it means something like "he who studies chinese language" but I like the first one better. At the end of the tour they invited us all out for a real Chinese country style meal. We went to a restaurant where the tables all had wood burners underneath them that heated a big wok shaped bowl in the middle of the table. Into this went all kinds of crazy ingredients (including chicken heads, tofu, mushrooms, noodles, spices and an assortment of other things that I can't remember). It was delicious and cheap. Our Chinese friends insisted on paying though we insisted that they shouldn't. They did anyway, so Hurley slipped the money into one of their coat pockets (have you found the money yet girls?)

After a fun evening of dining and playing games in the square in front of the train station we all parted. Hurley, the Kiwis (New Zealanders), and myself all got on the next night train and headed for Pingyao.

It seems that there is always somebody snorting, snoring, sneezing, or crying on the night trains, but if you do enough during the day you can sleep right through it. I did. The next day was Pingyao.