Five Dragon Pool and Daming Lake Park

The three young ladies who accompanied us on our very first sight-seeing adventure are all graduate students.  Their itinerary was wonderful::  

For this Saturday, I make a plan for us. We start from our campus then take the bus to QUANCHENG Square, then we could take walk to visit the five most classic scenery spots that are: BAOTU Spring (Spouting Spring),Wulongtan (Five Dragon Ponds ), Heihu Spring (Black Tiger Sping), Daming Lake, and Fu Rong Jie ( Water Lily Street). Most people who come to JINAN won't miss these place. They are near to each other. Some of them are free, and the charged scenery spots are not expensive and are half price for students. And we will have lunch at FU Rong Jie which is a famous snack street and we students love it very much. Oh, by the way, A day is sufficient for all these places, since we only have  half day so we may need to skip one or two of them according to the real situation.

The one with the umbrella is June which is her English name and sounds a lot like her Chinese name. The other two girls are Hannah and Molly. They enjoyed asking me cultural questions about America and my life. We ate lunch in a hole-in-the-wall noodle restaurant along an very old street famous for its "snacks."  Snacks in China are much different from what Americans think of as snacks. Anything on a stick is
sold by a street vendor is a snack. ANYTHING. Actually, the snacks here in Jinan are tame compared to the snacks I remember seeing in pictures taken in Beijing during the 2008 Olympics.

Daming Lake and Five Dragon Pool Park(& Baotou Spring which we will see another time) are part of a larger natural spring water system that Jinan is famous for. Daming Lake Park was created a little over 200 years ago. It's an interesting piece of history and an extraordinary marvel of nature to walk through.

In 5 Dragon Pool Park I viewed a small exhibit of historic photos taken in Jinan around a hundred years ago. The only forms of transportation pictured were: walking, bicycles, and rickshaws. With all the walking I'm doing these days, I was particularly impressed with how hard it must have been to be a rickshaw operator. Not only would they have to pull the load of a person or two, but also run! I also learned that 5 Dragon Pool Park contains many memorials to a famous Chinese military leader who came from Jinan and was particularly loyal to his emperor and taught all those he lead to be loyal, friendly, kind, etc.; just like a good Boy Scout.