Jindi Plaza 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 a kind of misguided feudal educator, and clan ties and ancestor worship were viewed as a threat.

In 1948 Confucius direct heir, the first born son of the 77th generation of the Kong Family, fled to Taiwan. This broke a two thousand five hundred year tradition of Kong residence in Qufu.

While the current popularity of the great sage is undeniable, it is debatable as to what ...

Hey Hey and a Big G'Day toya,

Confucius once said: Is it not a joy to have friends come from afar?
Am I not a friendly chap and am I not from afar?
I say Yeah to that olchap!

Here I sit in the Qufu Youth Hostel with my 3 in 1 coffee and have been staring out the hostels large window that offers a perfect view of the street outside. For the past hour my views have been of what was once a main ...

Not long left now so it was time to start heading back towards Beijing, a trip that has taken me through various parts of northern Shandong province, home of a number of sites that are just how you imagine imperial China from the movies. My first stop was Qufu, the hometown of Confucius (Kong Fuzi). The first highlight of arriving here was my first sighting of a real dragon. Well, the dancing lantern type anyway. It was the last night of the Spring Festival ...

... 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 ...

... that you just wanted to put her in your pocket and take her home. One of our friends from the last leg of the trans-mongolian train we'd bumped into (a ridiculous coincidence really) walk into reception one morning to find her drawing a picture of a bunny rabbit! The only other thing worth mentioning was the 3h express train for the first leg ...

... the counter went off on a long explaination, all in Chinese of course, that neither of us could understand. Finally, some nice person who could speak enough English to translate came by, and helped us figure out that, yes, we could get to Nanjing, but we had to get off at a place where there was no stop. We got our tickets, and took the bus back to Qufu, and walked back to our hostel. And that is why today's word is qi2guai4.

... a huge understatement... the two of us are total plebs, I only like museums if they have lots of swords and stuff). We whirled through Kong temple, mansion and cemetery in record speed, despite Mum being hampered by a very sore knee.

The temple was very cool even for a cultural dumb bum like me and the town was neat, but even still, after a few hours we'd had enough, so we had a coffee and then headed for the bus station to catch a bus back to Jinan, only to find the bus ...

... the main sights 74 times..... Qufu is a lovely little town, very pretty and touristless since we have come at the coldest time of the year. The main sights in Qufu are called 'San Kong' which means 'Three Confuscius' or something similar and includes a temple, a mansion and a forest all of which either celebrate or actually hold Confuscius. On the second day, we made our way to a mountain called Nishan which is supposedly where Confuscius was actually born. Nishan is ...

... of this that set Michelle off at her mother with an exasperated interrogation along the lines of, "where the....we going." I just smiled bemusedly. By this point, I'd figured out that the only way to get any control over the situation was to make sure I'd got my hands on the return tickets before we got on any buses going anywhere. At the rate things were changing I was looking like missing my plane in 2 days time! Finally, we arrived in this ...