Xintan Hotel Qufu

... 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 ...

... In both places (meaning most of Ningxia, especially in the north and here in Qufu, everyone is after more than an extra Yuan. For a single bottle of one Yuan water they will ask for five Yuan and they will then argue why you should pay five Yuan instead of one Yuan. But it’s not only at road side stalls, it is even in super markets.

Two nights ago in a small ...

... taken away from and rebuilt. In 1513 armed bandits sacked the temple and the Kong residence, resulting in walls being erected around the town of Qufu from 1522 to 1567 to fortify it and the towns Drum and Bell towers also remain.

Not so much a religion but a code that defines hierarchical relationships.

Confucianism has always had a huge impact on Chinese culture.

It ...

... have a dark haired Shirley Temple singing me sleepy lullabies the entire time. Instead I had several mosquitoes but not even they managed to raise me from my sleepy slumber. Of course as I write this their feasting is driving me insane and my legs will soon look like I’ve been fighting with a poodle sized devil but hey, I’m in Qufu town and Confucius once said:

Is it not a joy to have friends come ...

... and so it seemed that the entire town was out on the street following the antics of a massive golden dragon manned by a team of extremely animated, probably highly baijiu-fuelled local men. The dragon was followed by a team of drummers and was surging its way violently up and down the street with the entire crowd in tow, ducking in and out of various shops along the way and just about managing to dodge its own tail on the way out again. The next day I hit the ...

... 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 ...

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 ...

... 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 ...

... 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 ...