Confucius says: don't miss your bus, moron!

Trip Start Oct 19, 2007
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Flag of China  , Shandong,
Sunday, September 28, 2008

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 hard on the legs.

Qufu is the hometown of the ultra famous philosopher, Confucius. As such, the old town has been well preserved and had money showered on it. I had to read the Analects in second year uni. While I didn't much like them, there is no denying the man's influence, especially in this part of Asia. People from Korea and Japan often come to Qufu on pilgrimage to pay their respects to the sage bike
bike
 .

Mum and I are neither of us big museum or temple people (ok, so that is 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 station 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 completely 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!
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