Jinan Sights

Contrary to what I had been told I was amazed at some of the beautiful sights.

The springs we could not find although I am told they are over promoted and not that exciting.

The parks are pleasant. And once again it is so nice to see the Chinese people utilizing the parks.

The Chinese style Mosque dates from the late 13th Century. Admission is free. I was surprised that they let me in as I had a skirt on. They wanted to know if we were Muslim. Although none of us are they did show us through and spoke some English. The also showed us the prayer hall. We went into the souvenir shop but they wouldn't let us buy anything as we were not Muslim. I fully appreciated this. I wanted to donate them some money purely because they had been so kind but they wouldn't accept it.

We spent ages walking through Thousand Buddha Mountain. The statues were amazing. Admission was Y15.

We thought we were catching a cable car only to find that it was called a slide way. The slide way was Y30. It was like going on a roller coaster. You sit on a sled and you have a stick in front of you to go and stop. At the top you get off. I had sore abs from bracing on the way up. Going down was heaps of fun.

Barbara and Rebecca were going to try and get a refund when they saw it wasn't the cable car. I convinced them it was worth going up and it we didn't like it we could find the cable car to get back down. They were happy that they didn't miss the experience. The cable car was only Y25.

Jinan museum is not far from the Mountain. The admission was free. When we entered the museum it was a sea of colour. Some of the most amazing pictures. When we looked closer the sea of colour was photographs from the quake that hit on the 12 May. The photography was amazing but soon became very depressing.
There were several galleries some were devoted to painting others to calligraphy and ceramics. There were no English captions so a lot of the information was lost on us.