The Lantern Festival is the last day of China's Spring Festival. On that day, everything was decorated with lanterns of all varieties. Rows of these red lanterns lined both sides of a square near our home. It was quite a sight.

Yes, they have the Golden Arches in China, complete with Ronald relaxing on a bench out front. The Chinese characters on the front of the restaurant are mai dang lao. They do not mean McDonalds, but they sound like McDonalds. Proper names from other languages are simply transliterated, matching the syllables with the Chinese syllables that sound the most like them.

These shops are around the corner from our street. It looks like there are no doors, only windows. But if you look closely, you will see each window on the ground floor has a set of steps in front of it. Customers go up the steps and through the window to get into the shop. These are small one-room shops that sell music or clothes, or maybe have computers, copy machines or telephones for public use.

We call this street, which runs in front of the university, the green tunnel. When you turn onto this street in the summer, the light dims and the temperature cools perceptibly. We thought these were sycamores, but people told us, "No, they are French trees". After some research, we discovered they are London plane trees, a smaller relative of the American sycamore. They are called French trees in China because it was the French who first planted them here over 100 years ago.

On the streets, especially near parks, you will see people practicing traditional art forms. This man is making a bird from sugar. He scoops a blob of sugar syrup from the pot onto the end of a straw. Then he blows air into the sugar to create the bird's body, just like a glass blower creates shapes with molten glass. We have seen people making figures from palm leaves and from colored bread dough as well.

On weekends, there is a booksale at the end of our street. Dealers bring their books in their bicycle carts, and spread them out on the sidewalk. Some people browse, some sit and read. There are children's books, classics, computer books, art books - you name it. We have gotten one book here, but the selection in English is rather limited. :-)

This is the neighborhood church, which is about a 20 minute walk from our apartment. It has a congregation numbering in the thousands, a choir and a bookstore. Some of the hymns they sing are purely Chinese. Others are songs we recognize, and we can sing along in English while the congregation sings in Chinese.

The buses in Luoyang are brightly colored. They come in blue, orange, green and, as you can see, yellow. Some have stripes, and some have pictures like pine trees or palm trees or sunsets on them. I even saw one painted to look like it was made of bricks! For one yuan, you can go anywhere in the city. This is our preferred method of travel when we are going someplace that is too far away to walk to.

If you look back at the pictures we took on our walk on New Years Eve, you will see a picture of a moon door that we thought might be a kindergarten. In fact, it is a kindergarten, and Deanna teaches there now. This summer they did some extensive remodeling. The moon door is gone now, playground equipment has been added, and the kindergarten looks very colorful and inviting.

Copyright 2004, Dr. Lee Williams

Last Modified: 5 September 2004

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