Tai'an, Taishan Mountain, and Qufu

We left Shanghai on a 10 o'clock night train which was quite a fiasco with 22 people trying to stick together. Our professor and TA had painstakingly organized us into groups of Chinese speakers and non since we were split up into various cars, classes, and compartments all over the train and put a sticky note on our tickets to help us figure things out. The train station has a lobby where one can check the arrivals, departures, status, platform, and waiting room designation. The waiting room category was new to me. After walking through a mall-like corridor, we arrived in "waiting room 7" which though not a gigantic room, alone had an occupancy of something akin to Chicago Union Station. Everything went smoothly (only slight pushing and shoving in the boarding line) considering the amount of people that have to board a train all at once.

We got "hard sleepers" which have 6 bunks to a room stacked 3 high on each side and the 'room' actually has no wall from the passageway so the entire car is essentially one room. This type is 2nd or 3rd level of service, worst being coach seats with no a/c. I got the top bunk which has a head-bumping ceiling height and no window view. This was not a problem since the lights were turned out after an hour and the car was surprisingly quiet. The train was electric, rails continuously welded, and average speed was ~130 km/hr; thus is was a peaceful night and we got into Tai'an at the reasonable hour of 6:30 am.

Our day in Tai'an consisted chiefly of climbing mount Taishan. We were told it was very touristy so the path was paved all the way. When our local guide Michael, referred to "going upstairs" we thought he meant ascending by some funny translation. This was not the case: we were surprised to find out that the hike actually was 3,000 continuous steps, sometimes without landings for a few hundred of them. It was 5 kilometers and took about 2.5 or 3 hours at a not-too-strenuous pace. There were chairs tied to bamboo poles along the way in which people would carry you if you decided you'd had enough. There were also souvenirs galore including the very popular walking stick.

Once at the top, we visited Confucian and Taoist temples, climbed more steps (they seemed to never end) then had lunch at the hotel at the peak. Thousands of yuan and gobs of incense go to Confucius (as the Plato of the East) in prayers for young people to be accepted to good universities like Tsinghua (our partners on this project) and MIT. Red cards adorn the walls of the temple with kids names on them who are in their families prayers. Luckily none of us needed to pray for these things so we played 'coin toss into the vessels' for fun, sort of like a carnival game. We took the aerial cable car down the mountain for a different perspective and to save our knees. It was a nice ride and a scenic end to an exhausting day, but wasn't the last of the fun.

The "scenic" bus ride down the lower half of the mountain, as Michael the tour guide described it, was actually a thrill ride. The bus driver seemed as though he was paid by the number of trips he took rather than by the hour or any other such safe method. He sped around the sharp cliffs and blind corners, slamming on the breaks when met with another bus on the narrow winding road. I stuck my head out the window for fresh air but only on the concave turns.

The day in Qufu was another early one and was a bit tiring. The guide gave us a nice explanation of everything we were seeing at the Temple of Confucius and the Kong Family Mansion. Micheal is an indescribably energetic tour guide and likes to say 'yes' after each sentence or between phrases and 'come on, let's go' after we linger for more than a few seconds at any one spot. If you sit on a stone in the shade as a small respite from the scorching sun, he will quickly inspire you to move on. He must do this because there is always another tour on a 10 second lag or so behind us wherever we are. The microphones of various tour guides are always within earshot and listening to one tour guide becomes quite exhausting after a while so it is best to move quickly to keep a reasonable distance. Michael had some really positive energy and I was sad to see him go when we left for Jinan. After this long morning of touring and a sit-down lunch in a hotel restaurant, our bus drove for a couple hours to Jinan, the site of our design project and case study neighborhoods.