Watching Peonies at Wangcheng Park, Remembering My First Trip - Riding on a Tractor

During the Luoyang Peony Festival at the end of last spring, the whole family went to Wangcheng Park to see the peonies.

Traveling from Xi'an to Luoyang is very convenient, with high-speed trains taking about two hours. The high-speed train station has buses that directly reach Wangcheng Park (Line 28). Driving takes about four hours and three hundred kilometers. There are many people watching the flowers, and parking is a little tight.

In recent years, Luoyang has added several flower festival venues such as the China Garden, National Peony Garden, Shenzhou Peony Garden, and the Sui and Tang Dynasties Ruins Botanical Garden, all with the same ticket prices. During the peony flower festival, the peak blooming period costs 50 yuan, and the price is reduced to half a week before and after the peak blooming period. However, I still like to see flowers at Wangcheng Park.

There are still many people watching the flowers in Wangcheng Park. People constantly stop to admire, take photos, and laugh along the side of the peony pools.

In the gaps of watching the flowers, I sat on a bench beside the peony pool to rest and told my children about my experience watching peonies when I was a child.

That was when I was five or six, or even younger. I lived with my grandmother while my grandfather taught at a rural primary school in a county near Luoyang. During that peony flower festival, I think it was a benefit for my grandfather's school for teachers, or it was organized by the village to take teachers and their families to Luoyang to see the peonies.

I vaguely remember that it was a cool morning, my grandmother boiled a few eggs she had saved and packed some steamed buns, and together with the teachers' families, we took the village's big tractor and arranged benches in the rear car bed. My grandmother sat on a bench, and I was held in her arms. The car started moving, I lay in her arms, watching the treetops quickly receding, and I soon felt dizzy and nauseous. Later, thinking back, at that time, rural travel was still by ox cart, and bicycles were precious gifts when getting married. I probably had never ridden such a fast car.

That time should be my first travel in life. The destination was also Wangcheng Park. Besides the seasickness, I don't remember the flower viewing experience of that year, only a photo of me, a silly and dumb child standing in front of the peony pool, was pressed under my grandfather's glass desk.

In that era when photos were rare, that photo was deeply loved by my grandparents. They often pulled me to look at the beauty of the flowers in the photo, and how cute I was in front of the flowers.

So many years have passed, that photo is now blurry, my grandparents have long passed away, the peonies bloom and fall, bloom and fall again, and visitors to the garden change generation after generation. The only thing that remains unchanged is the beauty of the peonies, and the mood of appreciating them, year after year.

This trip, I always stayed with my child among the flowers, just watching, photographing, not visiting the ancient buildings and inscriptions, nor did we go to the park's animal garden. All eyes were filled with peonies, Yao Huang, Wei Zi, Zhao Fen, Qijiao, Peony Red… Different colors together formed the most beautiful scenery in the garden.

After seeing the flowers, my child gave me a drawing, black and white, he said it was a picture of the peony flower festival, just like my mother's old black and white photo.

Travel is to see landscapes, and also a landscape in life.

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