Taishan Mountain, Fascist Plums [Updated with Link to Full Gallery]

Edit: The full GrinnellGallery of my Dai Temple, Mount Taishan, and Kong Li adventures can be found here.

For the past four days, my program participants and I traveled to Shandong province, visited the Dai Buddhist Temple, climbed Mount Taishan, and stopped by Confucius's tomb at Kong Li. The Mount Taishan adventure was particularly cool; not only was the view from every direction breathaking and the temple complexes built onto the top of the mountain really cool (they are pictured on the back of the 5 RMB bill), but many of us opted to climb the stone staircase to the top of the mountain to earn the view (as opposed to taking the cowardly cable car up). The 7,500-step, 2-hour journey provided validating proof of the comically-long-stone-staircase-to-Asian-mountaintop-temple stereotype. Also, we got to get up ludicrously early to witness the sunrise from atop Taishan.

Of course, all of this adventuring also meant a fair amount of time spent on a charter bus. Rest stops allowed us to encounter such roadside delicasies as Dog Jerky and Fascist Plums (judging by the characters on the package, mistranslated from "French Plums"). While street vendors still try to catch our attention by yelling over and over "Hallo!" and "Coca Cola," my bargaining skills in Chinese have improved. One vendor walked up to me brandishing a bottle of water, asking for two RMB. I stopped walking, stared him in the eye, and firmly replied, "One." He blinked for a moment and relented. Victory was indeed mine.

The pictures that follow are 1) Part of the Dai Temple complex, honoring the Goddess of Mount Taishan, 2) the staircase we climbed up Mount Taishan, 3) Part of the temple complex on top of the mountain, 4) me in front of the sunrise atop Mount Taishan, and 5) Dog Jerky.

Hilarious Cultural Differences

As we have no meal plan (and, indeed, no kitchen with which to make food), we pretty much have to dine out around twice a day. Luckily, due to Chinese artificial currency devaluation, this typically costs between $0.50 and $3, depending on whether it is street food or a sit-down meal (the former being fast and delicious but at a greater risk of "la duzi," or "spicy stomach," afterwards).

After touring numerous restaurants, a few patterns emerge. First, the staring. Chinese people have little concept of personal space, physically or visually, and a group of Americans eating (be it quietly or raucously) often attracts gaping mouths and wide eyes. One recent night we sat at an outdoor patio and ate as a middle-aged man walked up to us and stood, 5 feet away, staring at us and grinning for 3-5 minutes. Second, because the majority of the menus are still illegible to us (one can usually pick out that such-and-such meal is somehow composed of, say, beef, though today we discovered a way-too-weird dish that tasted of barbecued beef and burnt coffee), even though we ask the restaurant owners or waiters what's good, they never tell us. Time after time, we ask what dish or dishes are their favorite, and time after time they say "I don't have a favorite dish" or "it's not on the menu," and attempt to avoid the question as much as they can. We find this very odd and vaguely troubling.

On a side note, while walking home last night a toothless old man approached us and asked us what country we were from. Upon learning we were American, he grinned broadly and gave us a thumbs-up, said he hated the Japanese, and thoroughly thanked us for "pounding them into the ground" while making violent downward-pointed punching motions.

The media below are from yesterday's bicycle shopping. Once one leaves campus one quickly finds that Nanjing is, as one of my classmates put it, "perpetual downtown." Note that every stop light has a countdown timer to better tempt motorists to run down pedestrians.

Preliminary Adventuring

Classes don't begin until tomorrow, so the last couple days have been mostly spent wandering around campus and the surrounding city both with some of my fellow program participants and by myself. This afternoon I went exploring Nanjing a bit alone, and while I have most of the vocabulary down for fairly complex lunchtime transactions, I'm sure I was quite a pain for the attendants at the post office and when purchasing a temporary cell phone.

While I could make a whole other blog about signs that are poorly-translated or make entertaining attempts at English (and indeed, I'm sure there are many such blogs), there are just a few that stand out. I failed to heed the first sign pictured, and paid for it in detergent (the culprits pictured second). The last sign is for a place that is literally called something like "Cat Space Coffee," which kind of works with the picture.

Nanjing is somewhat warm

Academic and municipal orientations began today, with placement exams in the morning (I'm hoping for the middle, not-too-hard but not-too-dumb class). Rhetorical nuggets from orientation include "Every time I lock my bike, I say good-bye to it in my head," and "If you are a little drunk, kind of argue or fight is easy to happen."

Below are pictures of the Nanjing University gate, a couple of the university's old (as is, so old we're-not-sure-how-old) buildings, and one of the nicer street-shop thoroughfares. Note the haze in almost all the pictures--unfortunately not fog, though.

As far as posting time listed by Google, I believe it is still CST. So the time at which I'm actually posting these updates is really 13 hours into the future.

Seoul's international airport is comically large

Spending the day (er, half-day? Morning? My concept of time was dropped out of the 747 somewhere over the North Pole) in Seoul's international airport, which is built as to accommodate 30-foot-tall people.

Use the woman next to the mechanical walkways for a sense of scale.


I'm gonna cram some Chinese for a few hours and try to stave off complete chronological disorientation.

A Word Regarding Batman

While I'm awaiting a connection...

To the right you can see a picture of a snow-dusted Batman under the "About Me" heading. This particular Batman, whom I won 7 years ago in a restaurant-claw-machine duel-off with a friend on the way to Philmont, has been strapped to the side of my pack with me on most of my major adventures (Backpacking the Rockies, bushwhacking in the Appalachians, gallivanting around Italy-England-France-Germany-Austria-Hungary-Czech Republic, college, hiking Utah's snowy Canyonlands, and now China). Even though my claw-machine skills bested my friend and won me the coveted Batman, he did go on to win The Flash has his consolation prize.

Psh. Who cares about The Flash, anyway?

Blog Post One: The Phantom Menace

While I adore my friends' "Day One" entries regarding their arrivals, my "Day One" (and, in fact, most of Day Two) will be consumed by travel alone. I'm driving to Omaha, where I will then fly to Chicago, where I will proceed to sit for 6 or 7 hours, then fly across the rest of the country and over the Pacific (which will also involve significantly more sitting for significantly more hours), sit around the Seoul airport for another 7 hours, and then take a 90 minute flight to Nanjing. I've equipped myself with an Economist, my Chinese textbook, a few movies, Watchmen, Team of Rivals, and the admission that I'll likely be buying several airport wi-fi memberships.

Presumably Not Blocked

I've tested this blog's URL in a Shanghai-based web browsing proxy against the Great Firewall of China, and it looks like for now Blogger and my blog specifically are clean. If you don't see any updates after August 20th, that likely means the government caught on and blocked me!