Trip to Henan Province: Part Three

Quick Note: Shaolin is a style of Kung Fu. It's where all that "Crane Stance" and "Tiger whatever" stuff comes from. It's also super old, and the same style Bruce Lee knew. I never got it clear enough to know if it's true, but I believe this was also the birthplace of Bruce Lee.

Once finished at the Grottoes, we had to make our way to Shaolin, but to cab back to the main city, then catch a bus would've taken a while. Time was not something we had to spare, since the three others had to work on Monday, so Thomas haggled a cab down to 200 yuan to take us to Shaolin. Expensive, but that's because it was an entirely different city. A bus also would've taken a lot longer. The cab ride was only about an hour, and total cost was about 80 yuan more than the bus. It wasn't so bad split four ways.

We got to Shaolin, and once again, before even getting into Shaolin, we were harassed for buses and whatnot out of Shaolin. We largely ignored them, but once again, a few ladies followed us in, and bothered us while we got tickets into Shaolin. One really, really, really positive thing (really!) about this place was that they had lockers. What a godsend! The Grottoes were exhausting because of the sheer weight we had to carry around (especially myself, with the laptop). Now we could walk around unburdened.

Shaolin was amazing. There were 12 year old kids that could have kicked my ass. They were all doing all sorts of flips, and there were several shows on a day. I have a 3 minute video of one of the routines. What is unfortunate is that this whole Shaolin area became such a tourist attraction. It's now filled with all sorts of fake crap, and some of the monks were clearly fake (I saw one secretly buying cigarettes off of a tourist off in a corner). It used to be a school, where they would train and learn all the time, but now, it seems like it's more of a "Learn what looks cool, so we can make more money". China is excellent at taking their oldest parts of history, and either destroying it, or covering it in so much fake, pirated crap that it is now unrecognizable, and has been stripped of most of its historic value.

Anyway, we saw several very cool things, like the 1000 pagodas (a forest filled with literally 1000 pagodas - although small), the Shaolin temple, which was impressive, but a lot of it, you had to question the legitimacy, and the training center, where the students actually practiced. We watched towards the end of the day, when the place was about to close to the public, so we got to see more training and less tourist-y crap. Out in the fields, they had huge lines of Shaolin students all marching and yelling out soldier-like responses. It was a lot more authentic feeling as we left.