First day in QuFu

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  Qufu, Shandong, China
Monday, February 9, 2009

Word of the day: qi2guai4 --strange, odd. That is the best word to describe this day, as you will see below. Someone asked me to put the tones in the word of the day, thus the numbers. I wanted to put in the characters, but this site can't deal with them, so I'm working on getting pictures of them or something. It won't let me use the tones that I am used to either, but the numbers work just as well.

We woke up on the train and 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 was 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 over to see what had happened. After about 10 or 15 minutes, another bus came, and we all got off to transfer to the other bus. As we walked across, we could see that a car had hit the side of the bus on the back corner. The front of the car was crushed and the hood had buckled, but I couldn't tell if anyone was hurt. When we finally arrived at the long-distance bus station, we tried to buy a ticket to Nanjing, and the woman behind the counter went off on a long explaination, all in Chinese of course, that neither of us could understand. Finally, some nice person who could speak enough English to translate came by, and helped us figure out that, yes, we could get to Nanjing, but we had to get off at a place where there was no stop. We got our tickets, and took the bus back to Qufu, and walked back to our hostel. And that is why today's word is qi2guai4.

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