Found this doll on sale yesterday – 30RMB, which is about 5＄! Sturdy fabric, long shoulder strap – it’s perfect for roaming around 💕
Follow up on part one of my Luoyang visit! You can see my post about the Longmen Grottoes in Luoyang, another beautiful site to see in the area 🙂
Did you know that for a long time the Peony was actually China’s official national flower? And it started right here in Luoyang, where the Peony was the flower of kings and noblemen. Now, there are many types of Peonies grown in the gardens of Luoyang, and those gardens are opened up to visitors during the annual Peony Festival!
Every year from the middle of April until the middle of May, the Peonies bloom and visitors from around the world come to check them out. The festival itself is during the peak time, usually April 15-25, when the flowers are at their most stunning.
There are many, many Peony gardens you can see, for example the Luoyang National Peony Garden (it was too busy so our tour bus couldn’t reach it; we checked out another garden) is said to be the very best. But there are many others you can see, like the one we visited. It was much smaller, but still breathtaking! You can check out China Highlight’s post for a list of options and prices!
You can reach Luoyang via Train (approximately 4 hours from Beijing and 8 hours from Shanghai) or by Flight, and the price to the gardens isn’t too bad. There are lots of hotels and restaurants to check out, and many other sightseeing activities for your family 🙂
Took a little trip to the Luòyáng , China this past weekend as part of a culture trip hosted by the University!
Pronounced something like “loi yahng,” this beautiful home to the National Peony Festival (I’ll add an update on the Peony Garden later) is one of the “cradles of Chinese Civiliazation” and one of the ancient capital cities of China (Henan has 2 of them! – Luoyang and Xinzheng). The city itself is amazingly clean and open, the streets are unlittered and it’s pretty modern.
The best part of my visit by far though was the Longmen Grottoes and the Peony Garden. This week was part of the 2 week festival they have each year for the Peony festival, so people were everywhere despite the rain.
The Longmen Grottoes themselves are absolutely mind-blowing ~ an amazing feat of human design and capability. To imagine that such intricate design, specific carvings, and gentle touch art were feasible so many centuries ago is one of those things that always stops me in my tracks. I know a lot of people aren’t as interested as I in history and stone statues (several of the teachers I was with were fairly denigrating about spending so much time in a “Stone Garden). But to me, standing on the same ground, touching the rocks they touched, seeing the art they created, glimpsing pieces of hearts long past. It’s simply miraculous.
The Grottoes are home to thousands and thousands of carvings on the stone faces of the mountain cliffs. Most are of Buddha or his followers, some are pagodas, buildings, and other designs. The varying stone colors used to frame and decorate the statues, each one different from the rest. Carved over a period of centuries (5th – 15th Century AD), each set was designed by a different artist, many from completely different times. You can trace the changes, both in religion and philosophy (skinny to fat Buddhas for example) and in art styles.
One of the other reasons the grottoes is so stunning is the River Yi (pron. ee) that runs alongside the valley in front of the rocks. The river is clean and beautiful, sweeping along a lovely walkway as antique-style dragon boats float up and down. Stone bridges line the view, criss-crossing over to the other side that offers views of antique buildings lining the mountain paths.
Lol, my best friend in the US gave me the blue earrings a few years ago. I just found the silver pair on the street last night. Cross-cultural earrings! 
There are few art forms as meditative, nostalgic and all-around blissful as the coloring book.
There’s just something magical about the ability to transform black-and-white pages into full blown works of art, without ever once undergoing a creative meltdown in the process. The process is intuitive, carefree — the artistic equivalent of a low-stakes game of freeze tag.
Yes, we’re waxing poetic about our third grade creative outlet of choice, the unassuming booklet of canvases that turns even the most reticent of artists into budding creative spirits. And although most practitioners of this enchanting art form haven’t yet hit puberty, there are ways for adults to participate in the glorious art of the coloring book. Enter Johanna Basford, the intrepid soul behind two adult coloring books, Secret Garden and Enchanted Forest, spreading the gospel of the coloring book to aspiring artists of a certain age.
Basford, a commercial illustrator based in the UK, modeled her first book The Secret Garden after the Brodick Castle Gardens on the Isle of Arran, on the West Coast of Scotland. “My grandfather was the head gardener there so we spent every summer and Christmas there,” she wrote to The Huffington Post. “The formal rose gardens of the castle, the Bavarian summer house and lily studded ponds were wonderful places to play as a child; a great place to cultivate a wild imagination!”
Dubbing herself an “inky illustrator,” Basford uses monochromatic lines to create wild naturescapes waiting to be filled with vitality. “The artwork is all super intricate with lots of hidden little details such as rogue butterflies and curious squirrels to find in the pages. There’s a list of things to find at the front of the book making it an inky treasure hunt of sorts!”
Judging by Basford’s success, we’d say adults are hungry for a creative outlet like this. The artist has sold over one million copies of Secret Garden worldwide, which has been translated into over 14 different languages. There’s something undeniably accessible about the semi-blank pages of a coloring book that provides the training wheels so many budding artists crave. “I think everyone has a creative spark, they just need the opportunity to let it flourish. A blank sheet of paper can be daunting, but a coloring book has the outlines already there, making it easier to pick up a pencil and begin making your mark. I think of the coloring books as collaborations, I create the artwork and the owner of the book brings the color.” . . . .
“She was free in her wildness. She was a wanderess, a drop of free water. She belonged to no man and to no city” ~ Roman Payne
Language Translation
Deceptively Blonde 