I treated to breakfast my fellow students that stayed in youth hostel in town. It was a huge buffet and they proved that sometimes a flat price does not work in favor of the hotel! I had afterwards arranged for a Mercedes minibus to drive us to Dengfeng, wait whilst I checked in at the Shaolin Int'l hotel, drop all our things in our room and then drive us up to the Shaolin temple where our headmaster Wei shifu would be waiting. The hotel was OKish, definitely not very int'l most of the staff did not speak English. Only the assistant manager did in quite an amusing wrong way..but he was at least trying. The temple was the local Disneyland..for couple of miles before the site you had peddlers and shops of all kind, mainly Shaolin paraphernalia - weapons, beads, clothes etc. We got special treatment as they allowed our driver to go past the first entrance to the top. There we met with 2 more students who had arrived to Dengfeng the previous day, Ryan (Spanish crazy tattooed hippy with shaven head minus a tuft in the front and a small ponytail in the back) and Federico (Colombian engineer - normal looking 38yr old). The 9 of us were taken by Wei shifu through all the gates without paying, straight into a performance by the monks which was amazing and videotaped by Theo. Having done and seen at the school a tiny fraction of what these were doing made me appreciate even more the extraordinary difficulty of their routines.
The monastery and temple consisted of several buoldings arranged around courtyards ascending the mountain. The buildings were beautiful; very evocative with camphora essence burning everywhere and monks' recorded chanting piped through hidden loudspeakers. What was not very beautiful were the mindless hordes of thousands of Chinese tourists charging through every opening. We were taken up the hill opposite the temple for some of the students to find a place to stay and to also get some lunch. Foreign tourists are taken for a ride in this place - everywhere they tried to rip us off and in few instances they achieved it. At lunch we sat at a very basic place, outside in the heat in a dirty courtyard under rickety fans. We ordered several beers and at least 10 dishes and a bowl of rice each. The bill came to Y700 which is very expensive for a good restaurant in that part of China. We had a standoff and managed to take it down to Y500 which was still double what it should have been. We when spend the afternoon being guided around the grounds by 2 13yr old monks. They were very patient with our partyof wandering monkeys. They had several cuts each on their heads, obviously from their training and conditioning. About the latter, there were several ancient trees in the courtyards with holes the size of fingers from monks' training over hundreds of years. The young monks also unlocked couple of halls and showed us the floors, where similarly, the floor had caved from the repetitive jumping and stumping of training feet.
We did some shopping at the shops outside the temple and then some more in the back streets of Dengfeng. Everywhere we were surrounded by impossibly cute toddlers with crotch-less jumpsuits and pants. This is standard in provincial China for all babies and toddlers, begging the obvious question what do parents or whoever holds the baby do when the inevitable happens!?
In the evening we all gathered at our 4star hotel for a western buffet. Couple of us had a la carte menu and the rest the buffet. I think management will be revisiting their price after Ryan scoffed everything in sight. He had over 7-x big plates and one of all the desserts - and there were several. Without the wine, the bill came to Y700 which further validated how conned we were up at the mountain. After a long day and few glasses of lovely Chianti I passed out into a deep, dreamless sleep.
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