China - Taishan - 3/10/2005

The train ride was very interesting overall, sadly enough we really got to start missing General Lee as soon as we got off the train in Taishan since our local tour guide was not there to greet us. Taishan seemed to be either extremely foggy when we got in or the train station had too much smog around it. When our new tour guide, named Maggie, got to meet us she profusely apologized and even sung a bit to make up for her being late. We promised to forgive her if she stopped singing, and thus peace was achieved very early in the morning.
We proceeded to visit a hotel in Taishan where we had a few rooms that we would occupy for a couple hours to "Freshen up", which meant take a quick shower and have a place to sit for a few minutes and relax, since we couldn't really sleep in that time because of the cramped quarters we found ourselves in. The TV was funny because one of the channels kept playing a scene from Spiderman 2 over and over with ads for some other movies every time in between of the following replay of the same scene from Spiderman 2.
Breakfast was a far cry from being good in my skewed opinion after almost a full week of the buffet at the Prime Hotel in Beijing. Ironically since I'm not a big coffee drinker, I found myself having two full cups of it to try to come back to the world of the living after all the drinking and partying of the previous night without significant sleep.
As soon as we were done with breakfast we dropped all our heavy stuff into one room and proceeded to head out with the small backpack we would need to climb Mt. Taishan and stay over there for the night.
Our tour guide took us to visit the Daimaio Temple that had a very nice Tea Garden, where we were invited to listen to an explanation about the different types of tea and what made them special. Since I'm not into drinking tea I was not extremely excited about that session, but something that made me even more uncomfortable was when they were selling us the different boxes of tea, and at the end Maggie, our guide, was given several boxes for herself. It seemed to me like it was a kickback for taking us in there. A scene that seemed to repeat itself at a souvenir store in the temple, where some people bought some gifts and she also walked out with something for herself. I'm not sure if she has a running tab and that's why she didn't pay or if it's a common practice, but coming from the world of Integrity of GE where any potential conflict of interest is to be avoided at all costs, this seemed like a huge one to me.
The temple was also very nice and it added to the architecture we got to see. Something that struck me though was how commercial they had made it, since there were a couple of booths where they were selling locks to write wishes on, and another one where they sold strings with papers attached to it to write messages and leave them behind. All of these things were there for luck, which struck me as something weird, but I guess that it played into people's sense of superstition.
After walking around the temple for awhile we were driven to a different hotel where we could eat lunch. While the meal was a bit of the same type of dishes it was much better than our breakfast, so we really wolfed it down. Although some people were trying not too eat too much, since they would have to walk up the mountain. Personally I decided at this point that I was tired enough where I didn't really feel like climbing the thousands of steps that were edged onto the mountainside "just for fun", so I proceeded to join the very small group of people who took the cable car up so I could lay down comfortably in the hotel room I was hoping would be up there.
Even doing the lazy man's version of the climb up the mountain in the cable car, proved hard, because of all the stairs between the exit of the cable car and the top of the mountain where our hotel was located. Considering we were also carrying with us two 48-packs of beer to have for that night it added significant weight to our part of the trip, but after some slow progress we made it up (significantly ahead of the next group that arrived maybe 30 minutes later, who started climbing at the bottom and then took the cable car the rest of the way up from the middle of the mountain). I was very happy that I got to the hotel when we did, since we managed to get one of the first rooms assigned, and this was critical in this "three-star" hotel that had very few rooms with running water and heat. Since I was already pretty tired, and cold, I went up to my room and proceeded to play with our Heating unit trying to get the room temperature up a bit, and after testing different settings managed to get something that in the end gave me a warmer room than the outside corridor or anywhere else I had visited in the hotel.
Dinner wasn't ver good either, especially since by the time I made it up there much of the food had been wolfed down. We finally got some more dishes served, and the best thing of the dinner was the French Fries, but when we asked for more we were told that we couldn't have any (This was a small plate that was put in front of our whole table, so it didn't have any hope of making it for long).
After dinner I was so tired that I really crashed in a bed that felt like a piece of wood that had been covered in concrete. Maybe the most notable part was when at a very late time (I think it was 11 pm, but it felt like 2 am) a lady basically burst into our room to turn off the central heating. I wasn't sure what was going on, and since she couldn't successfully communicate with us I just let her do it and went back under my covers. Later I was to find out that the central heating was turned off at that time so leaving the circulation on would have really cooled down our rooms, so I guess it was a good thing that my rebelious self didn't turn the air back on.