Mingya Xingtan Hotel Qufu

So I haven't updated in a while because i just had a test! I'm so happy for it to be over with! So last weekend the whole program went on a trip to the Shangdong province, specifically to two cities, Tai'an and Qufu. We took a sleeper train there, and that was really cool! The beds were in compartments of 6, with three attached to each wall and stacked on top of each other! In Tai'an we got to climb ...

... don’t take it head to the next stall.
They probably won’t take it either….now it’s your choice.
How thirsty are you?

It’s not often that Luo Wei ever comments on such things as for her they are simply trying to make the best of what they can while they can do it and being from a tiny rural village near Kaifeng city she has an understanding of ...

... pedicab drivers, taxi drivers and horse and carriage drivers. None of them seem to know the meaning of the word no in either English or Chinese and I am sure all of them have been body snatched from small rural touristy areas in Vietnam where I think some of the worlds best (also worst at the same time) come from.

For most there really isn’t a lot to see in Qufu besides the ...

... at four in the morning I grabbed a cab which cost me thirty Yuan.

The driver wanted sixty Yuan as there was only one of me but I was happy to camp in the bus station until the buses started two hours later, in the end me flashing thirty Yuan before his face had me in his cab faster than a speeding bullet. When I arrived not a single thing was open, not even the hotels I walked past on my first little walk around ...

... it was again rather foggy. This did produce a few spectacular swirling mist moments though, although I did avoid going right to the furthest viewing platform as the wind had got up so much that I feared a Crouching Tiger style finale dive off the mountain for me if I went too close to the edge, and definitely with less finesse than Zhang Ziyi manages. Legend has it that anyone who climbs the mountain will live to 100. I'm not sure what the gods of fate's ...

... The only address we could get ahold of for the hostel was in Pinyin, which means very little to a Chinese person, but fortunately, when we finally stopped in Nanjing 6 hours later, the taxi driver that they called for us understood the address and got us to our hostel. After we got to our room and put our things down, Caitlin and I sat and looked at each other, and said how we weren't really sure what happened, and how we got here, but wasn't it lucky that we had.

Qufu; the hometown of Confuscious was unfortunately not that great. Its a small town consumed by the tourist draw of the Confuscious temple, mansion and tomb. We frequently felt ripped off. A diamond in the rough however was the small chinese girl working at reception in our 2nd hostel (the first one stank really bad). She was so cute and helpful ...

... to see what had happened. After about 10 or 15 minutes, another bus came, and we all got off to transfer to the other bus. As we walked across, we could see that a car had hit the side of the bus on the back corner. The front of the car was crushed and the hood had buckled, but I couldn't tell if anyone was hurt. When we finally arrived at the long-distance bus station, we tried to buy a ticket to Nanjing, and the woman ...

... 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 ...

... The area was so depressing and represented the majority of Chinese in Shandong who live in poverty. We found an eerie closed-down fairground with a single skeleton of a carousel and a completely random aeroplane in a metal cage hidden among the forgotten half-built buildings and left-behind houses. Amazingly, we managed to have lunch in a restaurant which was the only place alive. Back to Qufu to reflect in one of the two places to go in the evening - a little coffee shop.