Monday, 12 September 2011

Jinan, Taishan and Qufu

After having studied Chinese for 2,5 weeks a reward was waiting for us. This weekend we went on our 4 day trip to Jinan, Taishan and Qufu. On Friday we left for Jinan which is the capital city of Shandong province. Even though we didn't spend much time there we had quite a lot of fun, because a meeting between the participants of the summer university and local students had been organized. After they showed us their university and had some singing performances we had a large "hot pot" dinner together. It was super-delicious and the Chinese students were lots of fun. The next day we left early to climb the Taishan mountain. It's a holy mountain with lots of shrines and temples. But before we could visit the temples 2 hours, approximately 1 million stairs and even more Chinese tourists awaited us. But it was definitely worth climbing all the way to the top of the mountain as you can see on the picuters.

Our final destination was Qufu, the birthplace of Confucius. We stayed at a nice traditional chinese-style hotel which was located right next to the Confucius temple. The temple was really nice but unfortunately I didn't learn much about the history of that place due to our tour guide. In the beginning I thought he was speaking Chinese but when I asked a Chinese friend what he was saying she told me that she had no clue either... because what had sounded like Chinese was supposed to be English! It could have been a nice tour but since I didn't understand a word of what he was trying to tell us it got really boring in the end. Afterwards we went to Confucius' grave which was a really cool place. It's in the middle of a huge graveyard where only his family members are buried. The place could have been out of a horror movie cause it had a really eerie atmosphere. It's definitely worth visiting!

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