Mount Tai and being a foreigner in China

I got back yesterday from a trip to Tai'an.
We started the trip by going to an amusement park and ended it with climbing Tai shan ( Mount Tai).
We had decided to only sleep one night at the hotel and then hang out and look around the city, which was smaller than we thought, waiting till we were gonna climb up the mountain to see the sun rise on Monday morning.
So i slept till sometime around 10.30 on Sunday and then did not really do anything particularly interesting until it was time to go to the mountain. We arrived by taxi before midnight at the red gate, we waited in line to get our tickets for the entrance to the mountain and some in our company bought some walking canes for the climb, i did not but i did buy a head light, suspecting it might be dark. The headlight was a great choice as it was pitch black some parts of the the way up.

The climb up the mountain was made of thousands of stone steps. Anyone who knows me knows how much i hate walking in stairs because of my knees so i can say right now that it was not easy to get to the top. The mountain  is over 1500 meters high and took us less than 4 hours to climb. At first it was really hot as it had been over 30 degrees Celsius during the day and that made me very sweaty through the climb but sometime after we reached half the mountain it started to get a bit colder and very humid and the higher we got the thicker the mist was. Closer to the top it was very windy, which is not a strange thing for such a high mountain, and we got pretty cold and put on some warmer clothes (not warm enough though).

It was very exhausting for me to get to the top and i had to take breaks every now and then to be sure i wouldn't fall. It was hard for one of my friends as well and we helped each other get to the top by encouraging one another, we reached the top by taking it one foot at a time counting out left and right foot. It was nice for me that i was not the only one struggling to go up all these steps, at the beginning everyone was climbing faster than me and had to take less breaks.
When we were at the top we found a spot to sit on to wait for the sun rise to come around 5 am.

It was pitch black when we got there and while we were freezing, waiting and exhausted from being up since 10 am, the black turned to grey and then to a white and then people started leaving. We asked where they were going and they said it's over. It had turned to day without us seeing a glimpse of the sun because of the thick mist.

This was very disappointing and we now had to climb back down the mountain cold and exhausted without not even seeing the sun rise. I don't really have much pictures of this trip for the very reason that it was dark and misty and not much to see because of this, during the night i would have needed to use the flash to take a picture, which would have resulted in a mostly white picture as the light would illuminate all the water in the air.

The climb up was much easier than the way down for different reasons.

Climbing up slippery stone is much easier than walking down and is not as dangerous. Climbing down i almost fell ones due to slipping on the steps and after that i was very scared and careful so that i would not fall down the stairs.

Because of it being very slippery to walk down i had to use more muscles and climb slower than i did on the way up which was very tiring for my legs and knees.

On the way up it was dark and therefore not as many people took notice of my appearance.
Now this is something i can find very annoying about China depending on my mood. Having just spent the night climbing up a 1500 meter mountain i was pretty exhausted and not in the mood for the "omg it's a foreigner!" reaction that we usually get in China, which was even worse at the mountain because of all the tourists. If people stare i don't care so much, that happens at home in Sweden because of my hair anyways, but when they stop as i am coming down the stairs to take a picture of me like i am some kind of freak show it annoys me. No one asks if they can take a picture of you, they just do it like you are an animal at a zoo and not a person. Some people just stop and pull out their phone when you can clearly see it and others try to sneak a selfie with you in it, either way is just very annoying and disrespectful in my opinion. At some point there were guys yelling after me in English, which i did not care for at all. They didn't say hello to my face when i walked past them, they started yelling behind me and i heard them trying to catch up when i didn't say hello back, i would have said a short hello to them out of courtesy if they had said it to my face but i am not gonna turn around and say hello after i have passed them. This for me was very uncomfortable and for a person with social anxiety it added to the stress i was feeling about people taking my picture all the time. As a woman as well it was not very appreciated to be yelled after by some men i didn't know, as i think any other woman can relate to.
We stopped to look at a temple on our way down and as i was looking i was reminded by my buddy that it is not respectful to take pictures in the temple when she saw a few other people doing it, i had been told this at an earlier trip by a Buddhist monk and i wanted to respect them so i did not take any pictures. A woman came up to me in this temple and asked me to take a picture with her which i found more annoying than usual because of my mood and because we were in a temple, i told her no and she, disappointed, left me alone.

This was a cool trip but the Chinese people turned some of it into a bad experience because of their lack of respect towards me as a person, to some of them i am just a foreigner, someone to take pictures of or talk to without my consent.

I have thought about this some in the past whilst being in Jinan but it has never been this bad and so i would tolerate it.
I wonder how a Chinese person would feel if people took pictures of them all the time, stopped them to take pictures with them, practiced their Chinese on them, asked their friend to translate for them so they could talk to them. I don't think they even realize that so many of them do this and that i do not exist for their entertainment.

Everyday China

There are a few things in everyday life in China that i do differently here than back in Sweden.

First thing i think of is the bathroom...
Public toilets like in tourist spots, restaurants, airports, schools etc are a bit different than in Europe.
In China they have squat holes in the floor that you squat above to pee, and you have to bring your own tissues most of the time as well. There is always a sink for you to wash your hands in but if they have soap is another question, i am surprised when public bathrooms have tissue or soap.
These toilets smell a lot, and i mean a lot if they are not cleaned regularly. The cleanest public bathroom i have seen to be honest was at the club, in Sweden the clubs have some of the nastiest bathrooms in my experience but here they clean them constantly all through the night, i guess they don't want the place to smell like urine.

On the subject of bathrooms...
The showers in our dorm have certain times during the day when there is hot water.. 6-8 am, 11.30-14  and 17.30-00.00. We are lucky though as we get to have private showers, the Chinese students have to take showers together in a separate building from their dorm and with no privacy.

Something that i as an exchange student don't have to deal with is curfew, the Chinese students' dorms get locked at 11pm. The dorms for the foreign students, however, are never closed so we can come and go as we please.

The university has a cafeteria. Yes there is a cafeteria on campus and it has 5 floors with different types of food and different prices. As a student here you get a student card, which you load with money so you can pay for your meals at the cafeteria. In the basement, which is the cheapest floor, you can get a whole plate of dumplings for just 5 yuan. Most things are cheap overall in the cafeteria compared to how much it would cost in Sweden to buy lunch everyday. They serve food from 6 am to 10 pm, only the basement is open till 10 pm though.

These are a few things i thought of now but i have more to tell but this entry is long enough already.
Now i will watch some Netflix and finish my 5 yuan ice coffee i bought after dinner.

Typical Chinese toilet.

The beginning of the blog

So i have now been in China for a month and i was hoping i would have blogged more but the blogging site i was going to use was not working for me properly when i felt like blogging so it was too much of a hassle so now i have decided to use my regular blog site instead.

There are many things i could say about China, in fact there are so many things i wanna say that i feel overwhelmed every time i am gonna write about it. So i will make a short post this time i think and maybe try to make several ones covering different subjects in the future.

I am enjoying China a lot but i am also missing the security of being home, it is a bit challenging at times for me with my social anxiety but i try to do the best i can and hopefully when i go home some of my problems won't be as hard anymore.

After i had been here for about 2 weeks i first got a cold and during the time i had that i also got a stomach virus. This has made things somewhat a bit harder for me as it makes me a bit nervous about food, for obvious reasons. I am slowly gaining back my trust for food though but something that is still very hard for me to eat is noodles, which is a big part of the cuisine in Jinan.

Jinan is the capitol city of the Shandong province and this is where i study. It is not one of the biggest cities in China but for a Swedish person it is very large since it has more inhabitants than all of Sweden.

There are many things as i've said that could be said about everything but it is too much to put in one post so i will stick to one subject at the time in future posts.

Here is a picture of Baotu Spring in Jinan, a very beautiful place.