When we arrived from Xinyang to Zhenzhou East train station, we spend some time to find the bus station, and from there we took the one hour bus ride to Kaifeng. Our friend, Bingjie’s cousin Diandian (gege – brother), picked us up. We went to eat, and after we went to the hotel he booked for us. But, a little problem, this hotel doesn’t take foreigners. If you ever go to China pay attention to this, because many hotels are only for Chinese residents. In this case the hotel doesn’t have to care about your registration with the government. At least I think that’s the reason, I haven’t actually checked.
Anyway, we had to look for another hotel. We were tired after the whole day of travelling, so the fact that we don’t have a place to stay made us a little bit hysterical. But in a good way? I don’t know, I remember it being a fun time. We walked around in the night with our luggage and joked about how we should just sleep on the street curb. The second hotel also didn’t accept foreigners. The third one did, but we decided it was too expensive. The fourth one was the lucky one this time. I’ve never slept better.
In the morning we just let Diandian do all the planning. He decided to take us to The Dragon Pavilion. The streets near the entrance all have traditional looking houses, but the ground floors are for all kinds of modern shops, which was an interesting dichotomy for me.
To get to the Dragon Pavilion, you need to walk along the path across the water, with one bridge in the middle. (Show on the picture above. The building in the distance is the Dragon Pavilion.)
This path and its flowers were the subjects of the previous post. There were also a lot of lanterns everywhere.
From the top of the Dragon Pavilion you can see a bit of the Qingming Park, which is a theme park based on the famous painting Along the River During the Qingming Festival by Zhang Zeduan. We visited it later in the day.
The ticket to the Dragon Pavilion will also grant you the access to the surrounding park. Well, it’s more like a lake with some walkway, but there are also parts that are park-like. In one of these we saw a number of people making some kind of golden ornaments and writing on big sheets of paper. When I asked about the purpose of this, they said it is for religious purposes. It was unclear what the religion was, but I presume it was the “Chinese religion”, which is a mixture of Taoism, Confucianism, Buddhism and Chinese mythology. Also known as folk religion. It appears that the Chinese do not have strictly divided religions, which is quite a revelation in itself. I want to note that most people that I dared to ask said they are not religious.
We spend some time strolling around the area, and then when the heat got too overwhelming, we sat down for a while. This was our morning in Kaifeng.