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No one was grumpy, it was just sunny today.

From top to bottom:

– Me on top of Xian’s city wall with a view of the outer city

– Dad in front of an enormous bell (this is /the/ bell, used for sound effects on tv and said to cure deafness, etc.)

– The mascot for the xian world horticultural expo

– An herbalist rabbit (from the ‘forest of stone tablets’ which is a place that has all the great ancient works of Chinese literature carved in stone for posterity)

– Some more handy animals.  I asked our host Dr. Li for explanation about these but didn’t get an explanation other than “you like frogs!  I bought you a frog!”

– Tasty farewell dinner with Shenqing Li who I failed to photograph.

The jokes about Chinese loudspeaker technology play out in many of these beautiful settings.  This mountain had a themesong which played in the gondola and also from discreet speakers at several points along the path.  So, while viewing the photos imagine an operatic soprano singing “Huaaaaashan… Huaaaaaa-a-a-shan…”

When the Shaolin monks asked for volunteers during their demonstration, I did not raise my hand!  It turns out they just wanted some people to embarass, though, not someone to beat with rakes.

The demonstration consisted of many impressive feats followed by an impossible feat:  they held up a balloon behind a sheet of glass, and then a man threw a needle through the glass (without breaking it) and popped the balloon.

After the demonstration we walked through the training grounds and watched some europeans who pay huge sums for lessons from the monks.

This is the monk graveyard — a pagoda, in this case, is a sort of crypt.  One of the newest pagodas is carved with modern themes:  bullet trains, jets, etc.

The man with the big camera is Kangdong Liu, our host in Zhengzhou.

(These photos are out of order thanks to an internet outage.)

Most buildings in this batch of photos were rebuild in the 80’s.  The temple has been burned down enough times that I’m tempted to question the efficacy of Shaolin fighting techniques.

Downhill from the monastary is a non-Shaolin kung fu school built here in hopes that some of the magic will rub off.