Henan

One more entry before Christmas, this time on a work outing to Henan province. Henan means south of the river, referring to the Yellow River (Huanghe). This was a project kickdown... a project kickdown in Shaolin Temple sounds pretty scary, but we all made it back intact! Phew!

After a project related meeting in the province capital Zhengzhou we went off to the White Horse Temple. This is the first Buddhist temple in China and the first officially built Buddhist temple in the world, built around year 65 AD. In the temple there was a water pond and story has it if you can make a coin float on the water that will bring you blessings. I was the only one in our group who could, without reverting to placing the coin on top of anything else at least. So I guess there are great many blessings coming my way. :-)

From there we went to the Longmen Grottoes, a large area with tons of caves with thousands of Buddha statues in them. Lots of the statues had their heads or in some cases more than that missing, destroyed in the course of the centuries. But it was still very impressive.

After a night in Luoyang city we headed on to Shaolin Temple. Shaolin temple is famous for two things: it's the birthplace of Zen-Buddhism and then of course there's kungfu. Actually more than a decade ago my mother brought me a T-shirt from Denmark that said "中国少林" (Zhongguo Shaolin / Shaolin, China) on the back, and as I had never heard of Shaolin temple I wondered for years what was the meaning of this "China few forests" thing, thinking it may have been something environmental, haha. In the temple we saw a kungfu show, those guys are pretty impressive! Shaolin temple also has its own brand of vegan cookies that are available elsewhere in China also, and they're yummy.

The pictures are here.