It was such a nice day that we wanted to go out and do some exploring of the city right around our apartment. Since it was New Year's Eve in China, things probably are a bit different from regular day-to-day Luoyang.

We walked down to what appears to be a large electrical generating plant. In front of the main gate stands a statue of Chairman Mao. In Chengdu where Lee visited in 2001, there is a similar statue in the center of the city. The traffic in this area was not nearly as busy as on many of the surrounding streets.

This gentleman is painting custom New Year's signs with gold paint on a red paper background. The English translation for these signs is "couplets." People hang them on the sides of their doors. They state the householders wishes for the New Year. You can get preprinted ones with traditional messages, such as "happiness", "health", or "prosperity", or you can have a custom sign like this one. Almost every apartment in our stairwell has these signs on the doorway.

This store is typical of the hundreds in the area around us. This small grocery store serves the many apartments dwellers that live nearby. Since there are so many apartments, there are a great many such stores. Note the stacks of boxes in the front that contain produce, milk, and juices.

Immdiately to left of the Li Min store, shown in the picture above, stands a billboard with the picture of Yao Ming, the Chinese basketball star with the Houston Rockets. He seems to be the hottest marketing property in China at the present time. His photo even adorns the bottles of Pepsi that we purchase in the local supermarket.!

This is the Dazhang Supermarket where we shop for most of our groceries and household goods at the present time. "Da" means "big" in Chinese. The curtain doors are somewhat unique in our experience, but many stores in Luoyang use them. There are wide strips of plastic in front of a series of padded quilts behind. This seems to help keep out the cold. The store clerks are quite excited to see us whenever we come in, and we get big smiles and lots of "Ni Hao" at each visit.

We crossed the campus on our way home, but decided to put those photos into the pages for HUST. This moon door fronts a building just up the street from our apartment. It may be the door to a childcare facility or kindergarten. Speaking of children, Lee is constantly amazed at the number of small children on the streets of Luoyang. In other cities that he has visited, he did not see so many children on the streets. One finds moon doors like this on many streets in China.

Copyright 2004, Dr. Lee Williams

Last Modified: 22 January 2004

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