Datong (大同)

Hey new readers, it's good to see some new visitors taking a look at my blog because my parents weren't upping the views counter nearly as quickly as I would have liked. Last weekend I took my midterms and we took a long break to go to Datong as a group. Datong is about a five hour train ride west of Beijing and is quite convenient to get to if you take a night train. We left for Datong at midnight and arrived at five-ish in the morning and immediately took a bus to the first destination which was a giant pagoda constructed without any screws. Stop two was a temple built on the side of the cliff which was really cool. Day two we went to an old cliff face with over 1000 Buddhas carved into the face. The last thing we saw was a boring temple in Datong's downtown.  Sorry for being vague but this was not the highlight of my trip.
As we were leaving the boring temple I decided to get off the bus and explore the city a bit. Right next to the temple was a row of about 20 cranes working on reconstructing the city wall. Within the wall I could see a small neighborhood of single story old style houses that were most likely going to be demolished after the wall was rebuilt. So my friend and I walked through the construction site taking pictures and looking around. No one seemed to care that we were there, let alone we were foreigners freely walking around a construction site. Spray painted across almost every house (even the ones with people still living in them) was the "demolish"character, meaning all the houses in the neighborhood were going to be demolished most likely within the year. It was a real experience getting to see a part of Datong that other students and foreigners don't get to see; and soon enough even native city residents won't be able to see it either. Many people disagree with destroying historical neighborhoods such as this one because of the deep culture rooted in every family and sense of tradition that is not seen in most of modern China. I agree it would be unfortunate if I were to be forced out of my house, but the living conditions in which the residents endure is by modern standards unsanitary and unlivable. Because of this I have to agree that removing the residents from their rundown houses is something that must be done, even if a single family has lived there for hundreds of years. Hopefully the residents are fairly compensated and provided with a new place to live.