Och No!!

October 25 & 26: Tai Shan Mountain

It is the one of the 5 sacred Daoist Mountain in China located in Shandong Province, and I had the opportunity to hike it.  Shishi had been telling us she wanted to take us to this mountain to watch the sunrise.  Naturally we were really excited! We wanted to see some of China’s natural beauty and get out of Cangzhou.  So Monday night after teaching we jumped on the slow train to Tai Shin.  Train rides are always an experience.  There are 2 trains: slow and fast.  We love the fast train because it’s faster, less crowded and less smelly.  However it doesn’t go everywhere and is more costly so we take the slow train a lot.  On this adventure we were on the slow train.  We all had seats in different parts of the same compartment.  I sat with a bunch of Chinese men.  At first it was uncomfortable because they just stare….you get used to it but it takes a few minutes.  Here we are celebrities of sorts in the fact that they don’t see a lot of westerners so we are an oddity.  My group didn’t talk to me, but they were very nice.  When I needed to stretch my legs they moved their feet for me for those 5 seconds.  I had my iPod which was nice and made the 3 hours pass fairly quickly.  Edwina however had quite a different experience.  I looked up towards her seat and there was just a crowd.  Apparently the people she sat around just kept talking to her, and once she let them know she spoke a little bit of Chinese they wouldn’t leave her alone.  Even after she had switched back to English, some who spoke English kept speaking to her.  I called her about half way through and she told me about it….in Spanish though (our secret code language here in China, haha).  We got in to Tai Shin around 12:30pm and checked into our hotel.  We were excited to see how clear the sky was…..we’d forgotten what the stars looked like in our always smoggy-Cangzhou.

We had breakfast the next morning, and I was happy to see that we could see the mountains very clearly from out hotel.  It reminded me of seeing the San Bernardino Mountains from home, it was great!  We had breakfast at this place across the way…dumplings and rice, the good breakfast for any hiker, haha.  It was very tasty though.  Shishi ordered us mountain goat dumplings, they were really good and it’s always fun to try something local.  The hike was nice and very long.  We weren’t in a big hurry so we walked leisurely, stopping to take pictures and even for Shishi to have a cup of tea.  It took us 5 hours to walk half way.  The hike is all up stairs, which isn’t fun.  But we were talking almost the whole way and made it a good time.  Near the end of our hike my leg started really hurting so that made the last 30 min or so very painful.  But when we made it to the half way point we opted to take the cable car up the rest of the way.  When we got to the top we were very happy with our choice since the rest of the stairs to the top were near vertical.  The cable car ride was nice.  We were riding it and sunset which was beautiful. 

It was freezing at the top.  In the hotel I slept in leggings, PJ’s, 2 pairs of socks, nylon long sleeved t, thermal t and sweatshirt...and was still cold. We got up around 5:30 for a 6am sunrise.  We put on basically everything we had brought up, and I was nice and comfy while I watched sunrise.  It was beautiful! We all stood on this cliff, with every other Chinese person up there, and watched the sun com up over the clouds.  There was major cloud cover which actually enhanced the sunrise.  When the sun broke the horizon it came out in a line of light because of the top layer of clouds.  After an hour of picture taking we headed back down the mountain and hopped back on the train to get back to Cangzhou in time for 6:30 classes.  It was great trip and quite the hike. 

October 31, Halloween at DD Dragon!

November 6, Tianjin

Since we like to get out of Cangzhou as much as possible we decided to go and explore Tianjin.  It is between us and Beijing.  It’s a more European city, brought up by the high business of china and European business men.  It has some European streets and quarters.  We decided to get a hotel for 2 nights, since we weren’t sure if it was a one-day city or overnight city.  We mainly just walked around while we were there.  Our only real goal was to find one of the European parts.  We walked the city in search of breakfast and found this outdoor market which was fun to explore for a while.  Next we went in search of the Italian town, since we had seen signs for it.  It was great, as we came around this corner we first spied a grown man peeing on the wall, but our ‘OMG’ moments was quickly interrupted with me and Edwina yelling in excitement……we had seen Starbucks, in none other than Italian Town!!! It was wonderful.  We walked around, planning on doing Italian for lunch.  But instead we opted for Starbucks and to wait and do Italian for dinner with Abi.  She had gone back to the hotel, because she had gotten really sick a few days before.  We sat in Starbucks for a while, chatting and eating.  It was all decorated for Christmas and Edi and I were happy to try the new winter lattes.  We walked along the water way back to our hotel.  There was a ton of men fishing along the whole river.  There were even men swimming in it!! We were bundled up with mittens and scarves and there they were in their skivvies swimming in the water. 

That night we had a nice walk back down the river taking pictures of the city all lit up.  We had a tasty Italian dinner followed by 2 hours at Starbucks.  Lattes and card games are the best, and in how many countries can you play ‘Bullshit’ and actually yell out ‘bullshit’ in your excitement and not get dirty looks for saying it, haha.  After we had gotten too excited at calling someone out we tried to change the word, but just couldn’t.  We tried saying “Och No” in the most Scottish way possible, but we would just end up busting up.  It was really fun!! We played with Alistair’s cards with a bunch of Chinese generals and philosophers and had fun reading about them.  It was educational and fun!