Xi’an proved to be a very relaxing part of our trip. We slept in most mornings, walked around a lot and tried our best to soak up the “hot” weather (well, it might have only been 50 degrees Fahrenheit, but it felt good to us!). Xi’an was a nice city because within the walls it was big enough to feel open and yet small enough to walk around. Our only complaint was our attempts to get a train ticket to Pingyao, our next destination. As you can see in this picture, the train station is not the best place for any person suffering from claustrophobia. One morning at 7am we spent three hours buying two tickets, finding out they were to the wrong city (Pingliang not Pingyao), returning those tickets for a 20% return fee, then standing in line once again to find out they were all sold out 5-days in advance. So we left the station tired, frustrated, and 40 yuan poorer – not fun. We decided then to take a sleeper bus one night to arrive at Pingyao at 4am. Although the bus left two hours later than scheduled, the bus trip was pretty uneventful.

It was the drop-off which was interesting. Remember that scene in “North by Northwest” where Cary Grant’s character takes a bus that drops him off in the middle of nowhere? Imagine that at night and it’s freezing. The bus doors opened, we got our luggage, and the bus drove off. Ha! Fortunately we were prepared and about 10 minutes later a taxi arrived from the guesthouse we would be staying at in Pingyao to take us to a warm bed. Pingyao is a small, amazingly well-preserved city with walls containing its single-story, ancient-architecture housing. This small town used to be the bustling financial center of northern China a few hundred years ago, but (and this is quoting the financial museum there) the introduction of Western banking institutions single-handedly bankrupt the entire town. That was awkward to read with Chinese people around us. It now survives as a tourist town with shops, small hotels, and restaurants at every turn. The stillness and snail pace of the town was enjoyable, but the most interesting part of this city was seeing how Chinese people used to live – both the wealthy and poor. Ancient Chinese people seemed to love walls, something that made them feel protected and yet it also made it difficult while walking the streets to see anything other than gray walls and blue skies. It became a bit depressing after a while and we were only there for a day.

After our tour of Pingyao we took a train and bus to Datong in the northern part of the Shanxi province. We didn’t care much for the actual city, but thankfully that’s not what we came to see. We actually came to see the two big tourist sites – the Yungang Caves and the Hanging Monastery. The first was a series of beautiful caves carved into a rock face with unending Buddha’s on all sides. Some of them told the story of how Buddha became Buddha, others the story of an emperor outlawing Buddhism, but most of them just described the story of how a poor town spent all its money building monuments in rock, most of which have eroded away over time. The Hanging Monastery was the second and equally impressive site where local monks had to build their sanctuary on a mountain cliff to avoid the constant floods which plagued that area. Right now about 200 meters away there is a dam which holds back the water that used cause these floods. We hope you find this as humorous as we did when we heard our guide say “They build the monastery in order to pray to Buddha to save this area from the floods…but that didn’t work so they built a dam.” Wow! Maybe Buddha was “meditating, or he [was] busy, or perhaps he [was] sleeping…” (I Kings 18:27)! All of that aside, the actual monastery was beautiful and surprisingly sturdy after all these years.

This ended the 2nd leg of our journey through the province of Shanxi. In Xi’an we were able to physically see much of the Chinese history in the museums and at the different buildings, but on this part of our trip we actually experienced this history first hand. Still, the most important discovery to come out of Shanxi was not the walls or the monasteries. No, our greatest discovery was that in the midst of all these decaying idols, our Living Master was proving to us that certain events on this trip which we considered to be pure coincidence were actually carefully orchestrated. The One who knows our innermost needs knew ours, and as you will find out in our next entry, He provided.