I have lots of pictures of buildings around the city. I put a few here so you can see what they look like. I didn’t want to put too many because for those that haven’t been to Luoyang, they wouldn’t mean anything and it would get boring. Everywhere you go in the city, they are putting them up. Most of the tall apartment buildings in the pictures are around thirty stories.
To the left of this picture is the 5-Star Hotel Hua Yang Plaza Hotel. There are hardly any buildings straight ahead. The construction is just beginning. The building with the dark windows is the Peony Plaza Hotel. One of the pictures that you will see is taken from the other side. On the other side of the Peony Plaza Hotel is Peony Square.
On the left is the Hua Yang Plaza Hotel. This picture was taken almost two years later than the last picture. These are apartments and there are a lot more to the right of those. To the right of where I am standing taking this picture is the WANDA Mall.
This picture is taken from the back side of the Hua Yang Hotel on the right. Behind the hotel is Xi Yuan Park. It isn’t very big but it is a very nice park. The apartment buildings from the last picture are now on the left side of this picture. Looking straight ahead past the hotel are apartment buildings which are thirty-two stories. Both those apartments and the ones to the left are very expensive because of the location.
The building with the dark windows is the front of the Peony Plaza Hotel. The first picture in this group was taken from the backside. On the right, you can see the finished buildings from the last picture. On the left is just the structure of the buildings. There is a lot of work to be done yet before all of them are done. The first time that I went to Luoyang in 2002, there was nothing behind the Peony Plaza Hotel. It was just empty land for many years and as you can see here, it is being filled in. The above picture was taken in February of 2013.
I am standing in Peony Square taking this picture. Notice the three men standing with something in their hands. They are holding whips. The man on the left has one in each hand although it is difficult to see the one in his raised right hand. You can see something on the cement over by the man on the right edge of the picture in a gray sweater. I am not sure what you call that. Maybe it is called a top or a spindle. They take the whip and hit that top and make it spin. You will see this being done in different places in the city. They really crack the whip. I have only seen men do this, I did not see any women. Maybe it is a guy thing. To the left of where I am standing taking this picture are a couple of hotels, one of them is The New Friendship Hotel. This is where the delegation from La Crosse stayed when we came to Luoyang for the 5th Anniversary of the LLFA (La Crosse Luoyang Friendship Association) in April of 2002.
The picture above is looking out of the building at the Number 19 High School where my classroom was. The yellow building to the left is one of the dorms that the students stayed in and the blue-roofed building is full of restaurants where the students would go to eat. I would go there now and then also. If you look over the blue roof in the lower middle of the picture, you will see a building with a white “D” in a blue background. That is the store Dennis. It is a chain store, there are several in Luoyang. It sells groceries and other things. It was very convenient to have that there, I lived one block to the left of that store.
The two yellow buildings are the dorms at the Number 19 High School. There are 2,000 students that go to school here. One thousand students lived in the dorms and the rest live in Luoyang. I lived in a building behind the left dorm.
This is a walking street in Laocheng. On weekends and during festivals, there are food vendors and other vendors selling things on the sidewalks and the walking street. All of those red lanterns are lit up at night and it is really pretty.
This picture was taken from a walkway over the street. There are times that there is so much traffic that you can’t see the road itself. This is looking west toward the city of Luoyang. In the distance, you can see something sticking up. It is the Nine Dragon’s Sculpture. This street is very busy on the weekends. There are a lot of the food places that set up on the sidewalks to make it convenient for people to stop at along with places to buy things that the shops sell.
This is the Lijing Gate, it is the west entrance to Laocheng. As you walk over the bridge, the next two pictures below show the water channel as you look to the right and left.
Once you have walked through the Lijing Entrance Gate, this is what you see inside. There are shops and offices in the wall.
As you continue going east from the entrance gate, there are a lot of small shops.
This woman had a shop where she sold paintings and fans with peonies on them. I bought a couple of things here.
The Nine Dragon’s sculpture represents nine famous emperors of China.
This picture is from online. It shows the Nine Dragons and part of Laocheng.
All of that rubble was knocked down by workers with sledgehammers, not machines.
Sledgehammers are used to knock the bricks off as they slowly take the buildings down. The good bricks are stacked and kept to use on another building that will be put up. When you have this much people power like China has, a lot can get done. All of the construction in these pictures, whether tearing down or putting up was done by workers not machines.
These next pictures were taken out of my apartment window at the Number One Foreign Language School as a building was being taken down brick by brick and then construction began to put up one-story apartments that would be for teachers. These pictures were taken over a three week period.
The good bricks would be cleaned off, stacked and reused.
Cleaning up what’s left.
Starting to rebuild.
These next two pictures shows the beginning of a big shopping area. One of the stores would become Wang Fujing. It would be four floors of many kinds of stores and places to eat. Also in this shopping area would be many other kinds of stores including restaurants and a bank. One of the restaurants would be Jin Han Si. It would be a buffet with many kinds of foods. It was a very good place to go to.
At the time that I took this picture, I didn’t know then but six years later in August of 2010 I would be returning to teach at the Number 19 High School which is two blocks straight ahead down the street and to the left.
The reddish colored buildings on the left are apartment buildings. There are three of them and they are twenty-five stories high. When I first came to Luoyang in August of 2002, they were finishing them. I could see them from my apartment at the Number One Foreign Language School. The white building behind them is the Bank of China.
These are construction sites that were never finished. Because of the construction boom and so many apartment buildings were put up, it was overdone. There would be apartment complexes built but sometimes not many people would move into them. Some were finished, some were not and just the shell of the buildings are standing there.
I read that there was one apartment complex area in some city where enough apartments were built to hold one million people but only 30,000 people were living there so that left many buildings sitting empty. No furnishings, no nothing, just empty buildings.
This also includes shopping malls. The building would be built but because of hardly anyone living in the area, no companies would put shops in them. The biggest mall in the world is in southern China but it is mostly just the building. Very few stores moved in there.
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