Qufu Internartional 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 :)

... are English signs through out all three of the main sites. The 'Big Ticket’ costs 150 Yuan and it is best to begin your day at the southern most gate into the Confucius Temple which can be found just inside the southern most gate into the city on Shendao Lu.

Here you will find a heap of people selling overpriced drinks and fans etc.
Halve what ever they ask and if ...

... the night market. But the night market can not be compared to the one in Kaifeng city which is my faviourite night market in China. During the day the population of Qufu city can be cut into three.

Group one are those such as me, backpackers and tourist.

Group two are the locals that pretty much stick to their own territory.

Group three is made up of those pesky ...

... 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 ...

... literally. All of the trees were frozen, the waterfalls were frozen and quite soon I was pretty chilly and sporting everything I had brought with me. The view from the top has provoked such previous profound observations as "the world is small" - Confucius, and "the east is red" - Mao, so I didn't feel too shallow that my main thoughts were "brr, it's cold". Unfortunately the views from the top were not spectacular as in the spirit of most of my time in ...

... 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.

... 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 ...

... 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 ...

... 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 ...