Huang Huai Hotel 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 :)

... to Qufu and destroyed more than 6000 artifacts in November 1966.

Cemetery of Confucius

The Cemetery of Confucius lies to the north of the town of Qufu, the oldest graves found in this location date back to the Zhou Dynasty (1100 to 221BC). The original tomb erected here in memory of Confucius on the bank of the Sishui River had the shape of an axe. In addition, it had a ...

Hey Hey and a Big G'Day toya,

After a rather social evening at the hostel I woke feeling a tad too rough to hit the streets.

So I put head back to pillow and quickly fell back to sleep for a few more hours. I felt much better when I woke around eleven and quickly showered and packed. Luo Wei had boarded her train at six this morning and as it was her birthday last week I ...

... and sometimes even during our conversations he would fall into deep meditation.

Where Superman required but a phone booth to change to save the world Mr Monk simply needed a few seconds of silence and he was gone leaving only his robed shell for us to quietly contemplate. I never really thought that the Chinese people would find this so interesting but I believe I could have sold tickets to witness his ...

... is on climbing the mountain and then taking the cable car down, as this seems to be the approach favoured by most Chinese. However I was taking no chances and would have felt a bit of a cheat otherwise so have done the steps in both directions and so am holding out for at least some longevity credit from that! After this it's off for a few days in Beijing and really not long till my flight home, the end of the China adventure and the advent of the real world...

... no space left on the train. Instead, she told us, we could take a long distance bus. We walked the 20 minutes to the local bus stop, and bought tickets to go to the long distace bus station, a 45 minute ride away. Ten minutes into the ride, there was a lot of honking, and a "whump" noise and the whole bus rocked, then stopped. All of the Chinese people on the bus, in other words, everyone but Caitlin and myself, rushed ...

If it were not for the unfortunate fact that I was pretty much unable to walk after my first trip to Taishan (no, scrap that, I was crippled), I was going to go to Qufu during Golden Week. Sadly, I had a hard enough time negotiating flat surfaces, let alone the four flights of stairs it would have taken me to get to the ground floor (the first leg of the trip to the bus station). For this reason, I was stuck in my apartment for most of the rest of that week. Taishan is a bit ...

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 ...

... mad that I'd have the place to myself. Blind faith in my fellow man is not one of my strong suits, and I didn't want to have to learn to trust a total stranger in the few hours before bedtime so I could get some sleep. Barely had I opened my book (still finishing the book on Genghis Khan at this point) when one of the cyclists appeared in my door to ask whether I spoke English and, ascertaining that, whether she ...

... through mining, heavily industrial and military towns (I've never seen a train full of tanks before) was setting me to wonder where on earth we were being taken. This type of evolving plan based on economies of information is not uncommon in my experiences of China. Nonetheless it was a bit of the pain in the neck to be looking at 12 hours travelling in 2 days into what appeared to be anything but a natural landscape. 12 hours travelling ...