Longmen Grottoes and Luoyang No. 1 High School, and then flight back to Beijing

Large statue at Longmen Grottoes

We got up early to drive to the Longmen Grottoes.  While we only had a hour and a half there, what an amazing time!  It was another gorgeous day and it was so nice to be out of the pollution and haze of Beijing to see mountains, rivers, and the landscape that surrounded the site.

The Longmen Grottoes are a series of big caves that have tons of statues, carvings and engravings, including over 100,000 statues.  The Buddhas range from an inch to the largest one that is 57 feet tall.  It was hard to process how large the area was and how incredible the site was (it is one of the UNESCO World Heritage sights) since we spent such a short amount of time but we were certainly lucky to be able to visit.  

Next we visited the Luoyang No. 1 High School.  We were welcomed by the administrators who were excited to have us, and some students performed a dance and an opera song for the group.  We also toured the school and observed about 10 minutes of a class.  The class that I visited was a 12th grade English class.  they explained before we went into the room that students spend years 10 and 11 learning the curriculum, and most of grade 12 is spent reviewing for comprehensive exams to get into the Universities.  The class was reviewing some English phrases, and there were 38 students in the classroom.  What struck me was how many books the students carried with them, for some had large plastic boxes full of books and others had huge bags full.  The teacher would ask students to volunteer answers from their workbooks, and the class would often answer out loud, in unison.  In our time in the classroom, no student was off task or disruptive and when asked to do something, they all did so without having to be prompted again.  

Another striking difference between the schools was that the school had 2,000 students but only 89 classrooms, and the teachers move classrooms and students stay put!  The classroom we visited had work for the English class on the front board and a math problem in the back, and the classroom also had a ceiling camera, touch screen 50" TV on wheels, and a projector/screen in the front.  After the school visit we headed to the airport and flew back to Beijing, where we headed to dinner and then called it a night.