Leaving the Rain

Sunday, May 23, 2010--Nanjing to Qufu   It was still raining in Nanjing as we left for the bus station. Fortunately, we are traveling northward 7 hours today to an area where there should be sunshine.   It was a long bus trip, but we were in the front 2 seats giving us a good view of the route. We followed it on my map and could tell how we were progressing toward our destination of Qufu, the home of Confucius.   The bus dropped us off at the highway exit rather than bringing us into town. Others had also been life off at similar locations. According to the signs, it was 5 km (3 miles) into town. Since we had been sitting all day and the weather was good, we decided to walk. Of course, that caused lots of attention from people we passed on the way.   The Queli Hotel where we are staying is inside the old walled city of Qufu. The hotel is built in the old style. It is a 4-star hotel and is quite different from the style (low rise versas high rise) of the hotels where we have been staying and looks a lot like an old temple. One nice thing: the carpeting is clean! And the air conditioner seems to work better than the ones in other hotels where we have stayed.   The walled city of Qufu is a bit of a dissapointment to me. I hoped it would be filled with quaint buildings and would have limited traffic inside it. Unfortunately, neither is the case. The stores inside the walls look quite modern. And there is the same traffic inside the walls that there is everywhere else--traffic with no respect for pedestrians.   We wandered the streets for a while after dark, but we were tired and went to the room. Tomorrow will be our day of exploration.   Monday, May 24, 2010--Qufu   Last night, we realized we had a travel problem. Earlier, we had already decided that we needed to go straight to Beijing from here because the schedules would not give us time to see what we wanted to see at the stop we had planned. We canceled a hotel reservation two days ago. But last night, we realized we had made a mistake in buying a ticket to get us from here to Beijing.   Names in China are very similar. And it is very important to be able to try to show the names of towns in Chinese characters when planning travel. Unfortunately, the nearby town for the local train station is named Nanzhou and is not a large town meaning that it is not well known. Our guidebook did not have it spelled in Chinese characters for us to show when we bought our tickets to get from here to Beijing. While checking our tickets last night, we realized that we did not have tickets from Nanzhou to Beijing but from Nangzhou. They sound very similar. Unfortunately, Nangzhou is 7 hours south of here, whereas Berlin is 7 hours north of here. It is too much effort to go back there and use the tickets, so we spent this morning working on new plans.   Unfortunately, no one here in Qufu speaks much English. Most can only use a few phrases that match their jobs. No one in the hotel could understand our problem. We headed to the tourist office hoping for someone who spoke more English. One lady did, but it wasn't signifigantly more. I was only able to get her to understand that we wanted to know if we could get our money back for the wrong tickets by first showing her the exchange of 2 fives for 1 ten in the local currency and then trying to show an exchange of the tickets for money. She called the local station, and they told her we would have to go back to Nangzhou (the beginning station for the ticket) to get a refund. That's when we realized we just needed to accept the tickets as a loss.   From there, we went to the bus station to check on schedules to Beijing from here. We had decided to go by bus because the only train from here to Berlin leaves at 7:00 a.m. making it a horrible day of getting up extra early to get ready, check out of the hotel, and travel the 15-20 km (9-12 miles) to get to the train station in plenty of time before departure. Unfortunately, the bus station was not where it had been when my guidebook was written. It had moved to the edge of town, so we had to walk 4-5 km (2.5-3 miles) to get there. However, we were able to get tickets for a bus that wouldn't leave until 11:30 tomorrow morning.   After that, it was necessary to consider that our Beijing hotel reservation does not start until the 26th, yet our travel plans will now get us there on the 25th. I tried to go online to write the website to add another night. Unfortunately, there was no Internet connection, so we had to report the problem to the hotel front desk and hope that writing them later in the day would still work.   Our main reason for coming to Qufu was that it is the home of Confucius with a temple, an area of housing for his relatives, and a cemetery where he and his relatives are buried. With our travel planning out of the way, we went out to tour these sights.   The temple is large with different partitions which are passed via gates as one progresses through it. It includes many special tributes to Confucius by various former Chinese rulers. The Confucius Mansions is a huge compound where the descendents of Confusius lived and welcomed guests including emporers and kings. We could see into the houses to see how they were furnished. The cemetery is in a large wooded area and is the largest family cemetery in the world. We walked around it seeing some of the more elaborate tombs. Those often had statues of cats, rams, and horses in front of them. Finally, at the end of the cemetery tour we saw the tomb of Conufcius himself.   We were very tired after all the walking of the day. Probably we have walked more than on any other day of our travels so far.   I finished reading Shanghai Girls by Lisa Lee today. I was grreatly disappointed with the book. The first half was wonderful. But the second half rushed and had implausible aspects to it. I gave it 3 stars out of 4, an average of what I gave the first half (4 stars) and the second half (only 2 stars).