Qufu Hotel

... 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 :)

... a VIP Card and no drunken people yelling all about the place.

I have stayed in several YHA’s in China and many all around the world and they are pretty much all the same. They make you pay through the roof for a room with a bed, an air-conditioner, a window, a shower, a toilet and a basin and you provide the rest. I think they could at least provide towels and toilet paper. But ...

... city midday yesterday (Sunday) and had a very relaxing journey that took me from Shaanxi Province into Shandong Province. I spent most of my time sprawled out on my bunk reading and the rest of the time I spent chatting to a very charming monk that was heading home to Qingdao city to visit his parents. His English was as crazy as my Chinese and somewhere in between my phrase book got us through.

While I was ...

... 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 ...

... Chinese, if we were at the right place. I'm not sure how it happened, but they had some discussions among themselves, and hurried us through the gate before they opened it to the regular customers. Once again, seemingly out of nowhere, a woman who spoke enough English to help us just happened to be taking the same bus as us. She translated, telling us that they would indeed stop for us in Nanjing, though not at an official bus stop, and that they would help us call a ...

... the journey here from Beijing; It was by quite a way the best train I've ever been on. If an ipod were a train essentially... Sleek, white, spacious, overflowing with helpfull staff and very very fast. Obviously the trans-mongolian train had a certain charm and soul absent in this train but both have their place. Old vinyl record players and ipods.

... got off at our stop. The train station is not actually in Qufu, because the locals didn't want the train to disturb Confucius's tomb, so we had to take a taxi to our hostel. Onee we got settled in, we wanted to get tickets to Nanjing, just to be sure that we wouldn't be stranded here when it came time to leave in two days. We talked to the woman at the front desk, who called the trainstation for us, but found out that there ...

... out of their way to help you.

On the way back, Mum recognised a dumpling restaurant near my house, so we jumped off the bus and made it home about an hour or so earlier than if we had gone all the way back to the central station. How Mum managed to recognise the place even though unable to read any of the signs when I could not, despite living there for six months and being able to read Chinese is a) really embarrassing and b) a sign of how terribly vague I have become!

... known. It's said that the Qianlong Emperor (1736-1796) paid a visit to Qufu and, while there the cooks of the Kong Family Mansion made a Kong Family Feast for him. After the emperor participated in the feast, he was very pleased and satisfied. In Qufu, I stayed at the brandspanking new Youth Hostel which had only 2 guests at the time of my stay. Emma, the friendly receptionist speaks English and is happy to help with ...

... to say the least. We were dropped off at a random area on the side of the road and had to get onto another bus which took us to another random area on the side of another random road where we made our way towards the top of the mountain. 30 minutes later, we realised that there was actually NOTHING in this place whatsoever and that the places of interest had been closed up due to lack of tourists. We found the cave where Confuscius was born and detoured through a tiny ...