Travel Account #5: Dalian, Yantai, Ji'nan, Qufu

Is this good advertising or what?

This was the gritty part of the journey.  By this time we were getting really tired, already both low on money, and were now in the downhomey parts where the going was tough anyway.  I knew Dalian would be nothing special, as my book says it's a summer beach resort town, but someone had told C it was nice and he had been talking about it all along, so we went.  It was a nice city, and he managed to hook up with some friend from Mauritania studying there, who took us into his considerably-nicer-than-ours dorm room and fed us snacks and put a space heater in front of us, which felt comforting.  We also met two very sweet (Arabic and English-speaking) girls from Egypt who pointed us to the beach and the foreign student part of town.  Although, something funny happened with me and those girls, which was that I couldn't bring myself to make conversation with them.  Like I wanted to congratulate them on the recent happenings in their country but I clammed up and felt uncomfortable the whole time we were with them.  C was like, what's wrong with you, they speak English! chat! and I was like...sorry.  Honestly I think I have so little experience with people from the Middle East - like, actually from the Middle East, not just sort of foreign but studying at Skidmore - that there is some part of me that thinks I will have to interact with them differently than with other people.  It's not true.  I dunno what was up with me.  Anyway:

Yes, these girls do have matching jackets and scarves.

Dalian was only slightly warmer than Harbin, though, and C was starting to pressure me into not having my daily flavored milk tea (in an attempt to save money), and we had stayed in a few really uncomfortable rooms, and taken that hellish train from Harbin, so I was starting to get grumpy.  And one of those days, I can't remember which, I woke up feeling like I had been run over by a bus, I think from the lack of multiple pillows and an uncomfortably hot room, and so I spent most of the day whining.  hehehe.  Those are the days that C realizes I'm not joking about my need for a midday sugary milky caffeinated beverage.  That need is just a constant in my life. 
So we didn't end up doing anything spectacular in Dalian, but it was a good place to be tired for a few days and not feel like you were missing stuff.  The city itself was really new and clean, and I'm sure it's beautiful during the summer. 
Then, even though I had been wanting to go to Qufu, our main goal was Nanjing, so we took a ferry to Yantai in hopes that the train station there would have tickets (because there were none from Dalian itself).  The ferry was more like a boat the size of a cruise ship, and was nice except that of course by the end we had that group of smoking Chinese men standing around us wanting to chat.  But before they assembled, a nice old lady with an accent I could understand helped me unravel the knots in my ball of yarn, and we had a nice lunch in the cafeteria.  (me and C, not me and the old lady). 
When we got to Yantai - which strangely reminded me of Binghamton - we went straight to the train station and asked about tickets to Nanjing.  Nope, not for that day, or the next day, or the next, or the next.  Then I had this faint recollection of another moderately large city a few hours West called Ji'nan (maybe?), and asked about that, and there were THREE TICKETS LEFT.  And they were somehow really cheap.  So we bought two of them, and then went outside to gather our thoughts, and I had a little panic that I had been mistaken about the name of the city, and had accidentally bought us tickets for some city not in the province we were in.  But, everything was OK, I had not been mistaken.  So then we hauled our bags and asses down the street to the bus station, because there were no trains left that day to Ji'nan.  We got on a 6-hour bus and made it to Ji'nan pretty late, and had to wander around for a while looking for a cheap hotel.  When we succeeded in finding a cheap hotel, I cried pathetically for a bit.  I'm American, you know, not Mauritanian, I'm not used to dealing with conditions like this, I'd rather use dad's credit card and stay at a reasonable place than suffer night after night, it makes me uncomfortable to wake up to a dark room because we have no window, etc. etc.  I really am easygoing about these things, and can stay just about anywhere for a night or two, but four nights in a row when we're already exhausted, and with a lot of difficulty in between, is pushing it.  I've never been much of a camper, inside or outside, you know.  But I wouldn't cry so much if C wasn't such a satisfying comforter.  He's the enabler. 
Our tickets to Nanjing weren't for a day and a half so the next morning we made up our minds to take a day trip to Qufu, which was supposedly only an hour away.  Qufu is this little town where Confucius was born and lived, and I thought it might be cute and peaceful.  Also the other Skidmore teachers are at the university there, so I sort of wanted to see what I was missing in Zhuhai.  It ended up being a rather failed endeavor, what with there being one train and one bus per day between Ji'nan and Qufu, and we only got to spend an hour and a half actually there.  Also it wasn't cute or peaceful.  It was just small and even dirtier than other places, with more adamant souvenir vendors.  But we were reasonably happy all through the frustration, so whatever.  And it had been on our itinerary, so I would have felt cheated if we didn't make it there when we were so nearby. 
The next morning we went to a grocery store and stocked up on all kinds of things to take on the train, because we didn't want to be hungry like on the last train.  And for some reason we thought it was gonna be a really long ride, like at least 20 hours.  I guess I hadn't properly finger-measured my map.  So we got on the train and were feeling all prepared, me with my sweatpants and contacts and knitting and everything, but then this dude told us it would only take 10 hours to get to Nanjing.  And we were like, mannnn, this time we thought we had it all figured out! But oh well, and we had a very pleasant ride until about an hour and a half before arrival when the crowd of smoking Chinese men started gathering.  And just as I was going to lie down and take a nap, too.  I got to hold some guy's baby for a minute, but the father's voice was so loud and offensive that I almost couldn't even enjoy it.  That baby is going to have a messed up sense of how loud one should speak in public.  During this talk-to-the-foreigners session I at least did learn the word for rabbit, after describing the word I was looking for by saying something like "the small animal. has big ears, likes to eat carrots."