http://www.hesspoint.com

I just found a pretty comprehensive website on how to get a local Chinese number for your mobile phone. Using your foreign card via roaming can be very expensive. So this is a cheap option if you are coming to China and you want to stay connected. In my case I just walked into one of the thousands of mobile phone shops, pointed at one of the numbers and got a simcard. However I still don’t know how much I am really paying for calls. I found some information about the rates but I am not sure how accurate they are. One thing that is really annoying is that China Mobile is constantly sending me shortmessages, my phone can’t read. Even if it could, my knowledge of Chinese characters would not be sufficient to understand As far as I know it is not possible to make them stop sending these messages and on top you have to pay for them. Next week I will go to a shop and try to solve the problem.

By the way: on that page I linked above, you also find lots of other useful information on Internet access, shopping, tourist sites etc.: http://www.thebeijingguide.com/

I was really busy last week, so here comes my belated report about last weekend.

On Saturday we took a trip to Qufu (曲阜). It actually is a rather small town south of Jinan. The thing that makes it special is that it is the birthplace of Kong Zi (孔子) around the world also known as Confucius. Until today it is the residence of the Kong Family that also nowadays has great influence and power.

In Qufu you can visit three sights: The Confucius temple (孔庙), the Confucius Mansion (孔府) and the Confucius Forrest (孔林) where Confucius was burried. The price of all three sights is 105 Yuan. You can find a city map here.

On Sunday I was at the Shandong Education TV (山东教育电视台) to help with the selection process for applicants of the China Media University (中国传媒大学). So it was the final round and the students had to prove their knowledge of the English language. There were 60 high school students from all over Shandong Province. So each student would come up to the podium and introduce him- or herself and then my job was to ask some simple questions according to their self introduction.

After each student was done, the jury gave points reflecting the students performance. It was a really interesting and fun experience to be part of this. It was actually aired in the whole province but I didn’t catch it on TV. I try to get a disk with the show and mybe put some feeds on my blog but I can’t promise anything.

Tai Shan

Some facts about Tai Shan:

• Height: 1545m above sea level
• Climbing distance: 7.5 km
• 6660 steps to the top
• Admission: Y80 low-season, Y100 high-season, Y50 students
• Only 5 of China’s emperors ever climbed Tai Shan
• It is the most climbed mountain in the world

Some more information you can find here. The trip was still totally worth the effort. But let me start from the beginning:

Getting there:
We started on Friday at 13:00h in Jinan by bus to reach Tai’an (泰安市), which is the city at the foot of the mountain. Tai’an is about 70 km south of Jinan. You can get there by Train or by bus. If you take a flight, the next airport is Jinan Intl. Airport.

Climbing the mountain:
We went up taking the central route, which is the most interesting option. On the way there are temples everywhere that offer some quite peace and tranquility.

You can get to the top via stone steps that go all the way up. After about 3h we reached the Midway Gate to Heaven (中天门) where we took a rest and ate some Instant Noodles (方便面).

The last part of the way turned out to be really steep. And also the weather got continuously worse with every meter we climbed. We finally reached the Archway of Immortality at darkness.
If you go up, plan on 6-8h for the ascent and about 3h for the descent. You can also go up by bus and cable car, which however is pretty lame. Take lots of water and maybe some instant noodles. You can buy everything on the way as well, but prices go up as you do.

Spending the night:
The night at Tai Shan is quite short if you want to see the sunrise. It might however be a good idea to get a hotel room for the night. There are many hotels on top. Most people stay at the Shenqi Binguan, which is the biggest and also most expensive one. We opted for the Xianju Fandian, a smaller, less expensive one, which was quite decent. The food was not very good and totally overpriced, but that’s just the way it is on a mountain.

Watching the sunrise:
We got up at 4 after 2h of sleep and went to the Sunview Peak, where you have the best view on the sunrise. In our case it was all cloudy, so we did not see anything at all

You can use this link to calculate the sunrise time. When we waited for the sunrise, we where very surprised as a Chinese greeted us a German. It turned out that he studied in Kassel for sometime. Sometimes it’s funny how small the world is. I also could not help it to place a geocache on Tai Shan.

Afterwards we decided to walk down on foot, which took us about 3h and was quite challenging, since at the beginning the steps were wet and hence quite slippery. But we actually made it down in one piece. Back in Tai’an we decided to pay the Dai Temple (岱庙) a visit before going back to Jinan.

One of my goals here in China is to climb all 5 sacred mountains of China. So now I got one down, 4 to go

Today we (Wei Hou, his girlfriend, Volker and me) took a trip to the famous Baimai springs (百脉泉) in the city of Zhangqiu (章丘市) about 40 kilometers east of Jinan. It is a beatiful park with many springs. We went there by bus which took us right to the park. The entrance fee was 15 Y, which is about 1.5€. Baimai Spring Park and was regarded as one of the 72 famous springs in the Song Dynasty (960-1279). The water bubbles up like bunches of pearls. (Source) The park has a Buddha temple and a large lake with some islands. You can see people refill their water bottles at the springs and see the children play in the water. You can rent boats for 10 or 20 Kuai which is fun. I also got a very cool drawing of my chinese name.

何翰斯

It is quite a relaxing trip to get out of the city sometime, especially today as the smog was the worst in days and breathing was very hard.

You can see lots of photos in the photo section. More photos also here.

This is something I just saw in the street yesterday, that kind of puts everything what China is in one picture. I am not writing anything more, since this photos doesn’t need words.

You probably all know the Greek legend of Odysseus. Well my flight two days ago came pretty close to an odysee.

Our plane at the gate at Frankfurt Airport

The trip took about 36h in which I did not really get any sleep besides napping away for a total of maybe 2h. It first started with the flight route to Beijing via Shanghai. So we flew over Beijing, literally to get to Shanhai. There we took the grand tour of the airport (with our luggage) to come back to the same plane we had before one and a half hours later. Then we took of to Beijing, where our connecting flight to Beijing was supposed to leave about 4h later.

When we got there we got the news that the plane would be delayed for about 2h. So we checked in anyway. When we arrived at the gate, hell broke loose over Beijing. Thunder and lightning. So we where told that the plane is stuck in Jinan because of the weather and it will arrive another 1.5h later.

So the plane finally got there and we could board. When we thought we could finally start (and still make it to Jinan in time for the game Germany vs. Argentina) we had to wait another 45 minutes in the plane before we left the gater with a now a 5h delay. So the plane went to the runway, stood at the runway and then turned and went back to the gate. The game was still 0:0. We got back to the gate and waited there for maybe another 30 minutes. Before we finally took off the regular playing time was over with 1:1. After touching down in Jinan the SMS arrived telling us that Germany won. The other Chinese travellers must have thought we are crazy shoting: Deguo, deguo, which means Deutschland in Chinese
Anyway after another hour in the bus to the city I finally made it into my bed at about 4:30. After being up for 36h straight I slept till 3 in the afternoon the next day.

So thats my first report from Jinan, China. Stay tuned for more.