China - Taishan - 3/11/2005

This day begun with what will be remembered in my mind as the Sunrise of Almost Frostbite. After a very cold night on top of our mountain hotel where our kind hosts decided to shut down the heat after 10 pm (by knocking on our door and coming into our room when i had no idea what the heck they were talking about). I went out with a group of people to see the sunrise on top of the mountain. Luckily I paid attention to Brad (my roommate) who suggested we wear all our weather gear plus our "Chinese Communist General" Jackets (I guess I'll have to attach the pictures for it to be understandable in the future). The weather was probably below -20 degrees centigrade at that time, or in my terminology "Damn Cold". After following the wrong group of people wearing Chinese General Jackets we got to where we had a nice vantage point of the sunrise. All in all it was so cold it was not really worth it in my opinion. After breakfast we received the great news that given the strong winds we may not be able to go down the mountain in the cable cars, but we crossed our fingers hoping we'd be able to make it. Luckily by the time we got to the cable cars they had reactivated them and we were allowed to go down on them. We were lucky too since it was starting to snow a bit too on top of the mountain. After our descent from Mt. Taishan we went back to the hotel where we dropped things off the previous morning before climbing the mountain. After picking these things up we were taken to visit a village a couple of hours out of town, in this village we got to have lunch in the house of one of the villagers. The food was probably one of the best so far, but even with that in mind I'm already getting tired of all the different types of grass, bamboo, and tofu. I really was craving some McDonald's. After lunch at the village we were shown around it, and we were even taken to a kindergarten where the children put on a small show for us where they danced and sung and played with some of us. It reminded me a lot of some of the experiences I had in high school, and it gave me that usual feeling of sadness when some people are made to put on a show for other because they don't know any better. I also started getting an awful sense of things being "staged" for us, but overall I was happy to be back on the bus heading to the city.
After our short trip we were taken to the second "tourist trap" in this city, but this one raised a loud alarm in many of our minds when we walked into a room with VERY pricey pearls in it, and the manager of the store closed the door behind us and the doorknob was broken. We all managed to escape the place without purchasing anything, but that stunt probably caused our tour guide to lose most of the possible tip from many of us.
We then went to an Internet Cafe (or given the lack of functioning computers it was dubbed an InterNOT cafe), this proved to be a funny experience in trying to translate chinese in the keyboards with what we already know of Internet Explorer. Since the day wasn't going too well it didn't get better for this point, so we tried to use the PCs as well as we could and send as few e-mails as possible and get out of there.
For dinner we went to a Chinese version of Medieval Times, since it was a castle-like structure that had people in old Chinese costumes. The food was almost the same as all the other one we've had.
We made it to the train station 2 hours early and had ample time to buy beers for our ride to Shanghai. The train left on time and was much nicer than the previous one, and luckily i was able to get a room in the quiet car. The "Latin Quarter" room had its party was going as loud as usual, but they did close the door after awhile. I spent a short time with people in the "Midnight Bar" room just hanging out before heading out for a short rest in my room while the train kept heading to Shanghai... While it wasn't a nice soft bed, it WAS much softer than the bed on Mt. Taishan and although I slept a bit over 4 hours I was feeling happier about things as I felt myself getting closer to civilization.
One thing I'm learning about myself, is that I really appreciate being close to technology, tall buildings and other amenities found in large cities. Not sure I'd be able to survive long in a small town anymore... but alas, only time will tell.