Mikey Whalen's Blog Post

On Monday June 29 we went to the Longmen Grottos, which are located in Luoyang. The grottos were all statues of Buddhas for Buddhist to go and pray. Over thousands of Buddhas are located thought out the grottos ranging from height size and color. The Ming dynasty built the biggest Buddha statue that was 17 meters tall and the smallest one was 2 centimeters tall. Within one cave there is thousands of statues and others only have one or two statues. When we first walked up the stairs to the first set of caves I was so surprised because there was about a hundred caves on the side of a mountain and I thought it was the coolest thing. A decent amount of the statues were sadly destroyed from the Japanese during World War II. Some of the Buddhas were missing from an arm to a head and some were completely destroyed. You could also see many bullet holes in many of the statues. This made me angry because it was a religious place that people went to pray and some statues date back to 650 B.C and just destroyed them for no reason. The longman grottos were one of my favorite parts of the trip. 

         After the longman Grottos we drove to Dengfeng city and went to our finale excursion to the Snaolin Temple, a Kung Fu school. They school had about 30 thousand students. The students have about a 12 hour school day learning kung Fu and having regular classes with one day off a week and two weeks for their holiday, summer. I don't think I would be able to spend that much time on school and learning Kung Fu. The some students from the school put on a show for us it was very interesting. A kid that was about 8 was able to do back flips and put his legs behind his head and stuff. Then there was kids about my age doing cool stuff with swords nunchucks and other weapons and they were very good. Then Jakob went up on the stage to learn some Kung fu. He had to follow what this students was doing and it looked really hard but Jakob kept up with him pretty good. After the show we went to the actual temple and it was very big. The temple had many statues of Buddhist Gods and it was very interesting seeing all the students and people praying to all the statues and donating a lot of money. When we were leaving we saw all the Kung fu students practicing in this huge area and they looked like an army or something because they all walled in perfect lines and there was just so many of them. This and the grottos were some of my favorite parts of the whole trip.