Sorry for the extremely long time without updates. Things have been going along at a good pace here

- class is still very productive, the food is still good and the pollution still fluctuates between

pea soup and clear. I know it's been a long interval, so I'm putting up a few posts that I've had brewing for awhile. First is a pretty standard news post, followed by one on the idea of authenticity in China and later this week another on my visit with Mandi to the Great Wall.

Most recently, I took a two day trip with about sixty IUP students and teachers to Luoyang, an ancient capital of China and today a city of about six million residents located in China's central-eastern region. We took an overnight train for about eleven hours from a third huge train station in Beijing which I didn't know existed until now. We woke up and got off in Luoyang at about 7am - pretty convenient and quite comfortable. From there, we headed first to the White Horse Temple, site of the first Buddhist temple ever established in China. Next was the nominally more exciting Shaolin Temple, world-famous for its Gongfu-practicing (Kung Fu) monks. A neat place but very crowded - we did get to see a bit of a martial arts exhibition but overall the pagoda forest was a more interesting site, with the oldest pagodas dating back to the Yuan and even Tang dynasties (~1000-1400 years old). Some great Korean barbecue rounded out the night, which involves sitting around a table in the middle of which is a pit of hot coals with a grill. You order raw meat and then cook it yourself, which is fun and also extremely delicious. Two plates of lamb, two plates of beef, one of pork and a catfish (they cooked that one) later, I fell into bed at our hotel. 

The next day, we spent the morning at the real treasure of Luoyang - the Longmen Grottoes. Thousands of figures of the Buddha are carved into the rock walls on either side of the river, mostly recessed into caves or niches. Again, these date back about 1,500 years at the oldest and included some really impressive statues along with lots of intricate, smaller carvings. The honeycombed appearence of the rock from across the river was striking. China today has only a small Buddhist population and much of the work has been despoiled by either early twentieth-century Western collectors or rampaging Cultural Revolutionaries, but it's still very much worth visiting.

We came back for a banquet lunch and then spent the rest of the afternoon in a park outside the old city wall of Luoyang. Another IUP student, gifted in music, had brought her violin along and played for us as curious Chinese folks gathered around this outlandish group of foreigners holding their impromptu concert. 

Chinese kid: Are you from China or are you foreigners?

IUP student: What do you think?

Chinese kid: Foreigners.

IUP student: Good! What country do you think we are from?

Chinese kid: Korea?

To be fair he was only about seven :) Anyway, it was a great trip overall and a real relief to flee Beijing just as the pollution started becomign really unbearable, even if Luoyang's sky isn't exactly blue.

More posting soon, I promise.