Zheng Zhou to Ji nan

This morning we awoke around 6:45 by the screeching voice of a cockadoodle doo. Catherine and I felt extremely disoriented because we are not use to waking up in a cage. For those of you who don’t know what we are talking about, we went in an over night not so soft sleeper from Zheng Zhou city to Ji nan Province overnight. The sleeper had two sets of bunk beds with a foot in between, a side table where our premier of Juno played for a rousing crowd of 9 people the previous night, and a room fit for a tiger. We little chickidies were so glad to get out of that cage.
We met our tour guide, Lisa, quite fashionable women, and headed down the street in our tour bus for a hearty breakfast. We ate buffet style at a nice hotel about five minutes from the train station. Some of us, including Catherine and me fell asleep at the breakfast table from lack of soft sleeping. Luckily we had a two hour bus ride in order to reach our destination Qufu, Confucius’ hometown.

The bus ride was valuable time to sleep, snack, journal write and continue the bonding experience. Half way through the bus ride we stopped at a gas station to load up on “real Red Bull”, ice cream and snacks. That was enough to tie most of us over until we got to lunch. Our favorite part of lunch, aside from the beautiful musicians was that we had pita like bread. After lunch we arrived at Confucius’ temple. There are three main spots that Confucius is known for. There is the temple, the mansion, and forrest. Its important to understand that many people were at this site because Confucius is the most influential philosopher for not only China, but all of Asia. His values, and ideals were learned by his few scholars and passed down.

The temple looked similar to the Shao lin temple most of us visited with our homestays, and the mosque we visited in Xi an. The temple had the many traditional turtle/dragon/beaver stone creatures that you could touch in different places for luck, prosperity, happiness, health. The temple is a place that people come to celebrate the influential nature of Confucius. This concept was hard to understand because this place looked like the same places Budda and other gods were worshiped with kowtowing and insense. At the temple we encountered a room where vistors of Confucius would wait and be served different amounts of food, and beverages based on their ranking. We also observed signs Confucius received from the Emperor allowing Confucius to ride through the forbidden city on a horse. We walked through a garden where only Confucius’ students could go. There were vibrant flowers, bonsai, trees and a hint of a blue sky. It was refreshing to visit a serene atmosphere compared to the busy cities. Our favorite fact of the day was that Confucius would have honorary dinner celebrations. If it was an emperor he was serving there would be 196 dishes and 404 sets of tableware. However, if it was any ordinary person they would have less than 20 dishes and a limited supply of tableware.

As we left the temple we saw horses, and birds. This may not seem like something worthy of our precious journal entry, but understand that China is a society where most animals are consumed at the dinner table. We also visited Confucius, his son and his grandad’s tombstone. It was really interesting because there were people praying and touching his grave for knowledge and wisdom. It seemed a little out of place because Confucius was a leader not a god. However, it is important to understand that this man holds the fundamentals for life.

We drove another hour out of Jin an to reach our dinner and hotel in Tai Shan. Our dinner was at a restaurant that had a cow statue at the front. We ate in private rooms and ate hot pot style. Hot pot is where you have your own small vat boiling to the left of you and you add your meat, or vegetables and cook them as you please.

From dinner we arrived at our hotel, which is extremely refreshing because we have space. Most of us took showers, and settled in, but others went on runs, and to the internet cafes. It is about 11:04pm as we finish this article and we are tired princess’.

We would like to say I love you to our mama’s, our daddy’s and our sissy’s.
And Catherine would like to say that “she is wearing her daddy’s pants.”
Love your darling daughters,
Catherine and Jaclyn (the newly budding twins)