Hongkonghotel Jining

... there, his descendents did, and it was the least interesting one =p)
The forrest was really cool! and anyone related to Confucious can be buried there, its a man made forrest and full of neat stuff and giant green things!

this weekend i'm headed off to inner mongolia with some people from my program! I'll put up an entry and pictures when i get back!
love and miss you all :)

... as it is it really is such a wonderfully charming town that has been built around the Confucius Temple and Confucius Mansions. It is where the sage Confucius (551 to 479BC) was born and spent his entire lifetime. The inner-walled section of the city can easily be walked in an entire day. That is if you are as silly as me. It actually reminds me a lot of a smaller version of Kaifeng city ...

... train at four in the morning. Yeah, don’t you just love arriving in a new city at four in the morning…NOT! For those that need to know, you actually catch the train to Yangzhou city and not to Qufu town. When you arrive at Yanzhou head across the huge parking place/square thing and you’ll find the bus station.

It should cost around 3 or 4 Yuan and take fifteen minutes to Qufu.
As I ...

... sage, until the 77th generation fled to Taiwan in 1949. This was a great place to see the living style of the wealthy in the late Qing dynasty with lots of the original furniture and artwork preserved. The final main Confucius sight is the Confucius forest - a forest on the north of town containing the grave of Confucius and all of his many descendants since, good for a walk in the afternoon sunshine. The next day I pretty much repeated the same process on a ...

... I took some nice pictures in the forest, which looked like something out of Lord of the Rings, with the mist all around on the ground, over the golden brown leaves. I also took some pictures of the tomb of Confucious itself. The next morning, we took a taxi to the first bus station mentioned in the last entry, and took the short-distance bus to the long distance bus, this time with no mishaps. Once there, we asked the people at the gate for the bus, in ...

... was closed for the night. It wasn't even 6pm! A station worker on her way home called somebody on her cell and took us to the guard's office. The guard called the bus back to the station to take us back to Jinan. Unbelievable! Talk about spoilt! Seriously, sometimes it can be rough travelling around this country because you feel like it is open season on your wallet with scams to the left and hawkers to the right of you. Then there are times like these where people go ...

After a two-day pit stop at Suzhou to dump my luggage, I hopped onto another long distance bus and headed for Qufu, Confuscius' birth and deathplace, in Shandong province. Being the only foreigner on the bus, I was stared at, prodded and questioned in heavy accents for the next 12 hours before being dropped off on the side of the highway to (luckily, since my friends had to walk for an hour and a half to find transport) complete the lengthy journey. My taxi-driver told me he'd ...

... westerners don't run up to one another, hug like long-lost family, and sob with glee, so a pleasant acknowledgement was fine. Heck, I'd seen several westerners a day, on average, most of whom I had no desire to hug, much less cry with. Shortly, the train rolled in, the conductor helped me figure out where to go (the text on the ticket was in Cyrillic), I hauled my bags into my sleeping compartment, and I hoped ...

... s leader's resources. The area is full of interesting stories, but many have to do with his philosophies and a knowledge of Chinese etc. is required. One notable point is that all decendents of Confucious are allowed to be buried in the forest cemetary; our tour guide told us that a new body pops up almost every month, and there are now 100 000 decents buried there!! (80 somethingth generation and thousands of years later, it IS possible ...

... hell girlfriend who nearly jumped straight back on the bus to Jinan. We were told that the place we'd come to see wasn't actually open, but the next day after some more arguments we were taken to some kind of park where apparently lots of fruit grew on the trees. It was designed as a theme park and included model dinosaurs. It really didn't add up. As far as I can figure out in hindsight, he is using pyramid schemes to prey on retired and ...