We boarded our bus around 8:30 a.m. (June 9) to travel to the hometown of Confucius in Qufu.

After a brief ride on smoothly paved highways through rural hilly countryside, we arrived at a local buffet in Qufu. The bathrooms at this buffet should have made us wary, considering they were unclean holes in the ground surrounded by concrete without toilet paper or a place to wash your hands.

To make a long uncomfortable story short, the next few days were not so great for me.

Qufu is a much more tourist city than Zibo, where we go to school. However, it has many interesting sites and some nicer shopping venues.

We visited the Confucius mansion, where I was able to get some of my favorite photos from this trip.

It was the quintessential Chinese architecture and rich history of the place that really set it apart from our other excursions.

Inside the mansion, we found a local artisan who made us beautiful works of calligraphy on either a scroll or a Chinese fan. Walking through the ancient doorways leading us through hallways into rooms once occupied by the highest ranks of Chinese society, I can only think of how much China has changed.

Before the trip my idea of China was Qufu, an archaic totally alien world from where I came from, but the real China is a modern place that mirrors the west in many ways.

Qufu is for tourists and history buffs, a curiosity in the way as Colonial Williamsburg in America.

That night we traveled to the nearby city of Tai’an, where we would wake up the following morning to tackle one of our biggest challenges of the trip the holy mountain of Taishan.

— Morris Longo, a sophomore business management major