The past two days have been an adventure. On Thursday morning we headed on a bus to Qufu, the place where Confucius taught.

In the temple, there were many interesting aspects.

Every few hundred feet, there were gates that had a raised frame that were meant to keep out bad spirits. In some of the courtyards, there were giant stone mythical animals that had characters carved on stone above them.

After visiting the temple, we went to Confucius’ resting place. There cemetery had tombstones like we do, but they were not placed in neat rows like ours.

Where Confucius’ tombstone is, there is a giant hill where they let grass grow wildly.

Friday morning we traveled to Taian to climb Mt. Taishan. This mountain has thousands of stone steps that lead up to gates on different peaks.

Since it takes people around six hours to climb up the steps from the base, we took a bus to the halfway point and climbed up to the “South Gate to Heaven.”

It took around two hours to climb more than 3,000 steps, but the view at the top was amazing.

At the top of the mountain there was a Daoist temple, and from where we were you could see other temples nearby.

After we walked back down the stairs at Mt. Taishan, we traveled to Jinan and visited the Jinan China Baotu Spring Park. The park had many lakes with fish, and one area contained two seals.

The main lake had three natural springs coming up.

Even though our two days were jammed-packed with activities, it was exciting throughout.

— Katie Haughey, a junior psychology major