Lao Shan

Just a few minutes to write a quick update, we are going to spend the next couple of days in Qufu, Confucius' birthplace during our week off. We were planning on leaving earlier today, but since we only went to the ticket office early this afternoon, and getting around Shandong province takes much more time than we thought, we've decided to go at night and take an overnight train. We'll get into Jinan, the capital of Shandong province, at 5 tomorrow, and then take a bus to Qufu. Hopefully it should be a neat trip.
Yesterday we went with the other teachers and the school to Lao Shan, or Lao mountain, which is a mountain about an hour outside of Qingdao that is a famous Taoist holy mountain. We left at 7am and didn't get back until 7 pm, so it was a full day of hiking. We hiked up two peaks, a southern peak in the morning and a northern peak in the afternoon (it was hard to tell if they were THE peaks or two of several). The mountain was beautiful, and the day was cool and misty, which ruined the view but made hiking pleasant. It wasn't exactly the pristine wilderness that we expect from hiking in nature, given that there were tons of little stalls of people selling tea, dried fish, and nick-nacks, but there were long stretches where it was just the mountain scenery and us, with almost no other hikers. Indeed, we were the only ones at the northern peak summit, the taller and more isolated rugged one. One other difference was that much of the path was steps, either stone or concrete, which was actually more difficult; it's much harder to walk up steps to the top of a mountain than to climb a steep path. All things considered, it's definitely something I would want to do again. Along one of the paths descending from the mountain we came across a monkey cage, although the monkeys seemed to have found a way out. One monkey in particular was quite aggressive and stole one of the teacher's gatorade bottle. He was unable to open it though, before another monkey nursing her infant stole it from him. Eventually the teacher took off the lid and put it at the top of the cage and the alpha male dumped it on top of himself, but managed to get a sip in.
We also had a very nice lunch in a restaurant that consisted of lots of little private buildings. The lunch included, among other things, some fried insects that we dipped in salt and pepper. They didn't have a lot of flavor though, they were mainly just crunchy.