My two days at the peony festival in Luoyang are now behind me. The weather was splendid and the peonies were flowering their hearts out. The festival is a big deal for the Chinese, but there were not a lot of Westerners besides our group. This meant that we were asked to pose in plenty of pictures with the Chinese; overall the Chinese were very interested in taking pictures of each other and occasionally less of the flowers themselves. I, and my friends on the other hand have by now amassed around a thousand pictures each, and most of them are of peonies.. So, these are just a few I picked…