Shengdu International Hotel Jining

... of the five sacred mountains in China, Taishan. It has a total 6000+ steps, but we only climbed 3000! Still it was a workout, but the view from the top was awesome!
Then we went to Qufu, which is only about a 1.5 hour bus ride away. Qufu is Confucious' hometown, so we visited everything Confucious! We saw Confucious temple, then Confucious burial forest, and his mansion (he didn't actually ...

... line. It is 1266 m in length and lined by cypress and pine trees.

Along this road lies the Yan Temple, dedicated to Confucius' favorite student.

Kong Family Mansion

The descendants of Confucius lived in the Kong family mansion located to the east of the temple.
They were in charge of tending to the temple and cemetery.

In particular, they were in ...

... stay in a hotel like this but as I haven’t seen Luo Wei for over a month and as I have said above it was her birthday so I chose the Youth Hostel to begin our journey together for the next three weeks to one month.

Luo We arrived around one and by two she was impossible to wake.

I spent the rest of the day and the evening walking all over the old walled core of Qufu. As ...

... 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 ...

... smaller scale by visiting the birthplace of Mencius, Confucius' most famous disciple, in nearby Zoucheng. Again this took the form of a Mencius temple (I am still a little mystified at how what began life as a philosophy has become afilliated into a religion with a huge amount of overlap with both Taoism and Buddhism) and the Mencius family mansions. This was almost more impressive than the Confucian version as when I went the place was almost entirely ...

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 ...

... Confucius. Most tourists go there in order to see the places where Confucius lived, studied and was buried. There aren't any high buildings in Qufu, since the local people don't allow their buildings to exceed the height of the Dacheng Hall (81 feet) which the main hall of the Temple of Confucius. In this way, they show their respect for this great person. Qufu is a city of great character. One fifth of the residents of ...

... 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 ...

... in Northern Jiangsu. Anyway, back to our adventures in Pizhou. It took us about 2 minutes to figure out that something was not quite right about our host, and 5 minutes to completely distrust him. He tried to impress us by showing some pictures of himself with foreigners and some trees. In all his pictures he was either hanging on to the other person in the photo whilst they stood there smiling politely or tagged on the end of a line ...

... zou het niet makkelijker zijn om simpelweg van trein te wisselen??! Elke wagon wordt afgekoppeld en opgekrikt, de wielstellen worden er onder uit gerold en dan weggehezen met een kraan, waarna de nieuwe er onder gerold worden... De trein vertrok s'avonds. Francois en Julie deelden hun couchette met 2 Mongoolse zakenmensen die vrij snel zijn gaan slapen, afspraak dus in couchette. Deze deelden we met een Duitser en een Zwitser, die een half ...