Nanjing

I made a midweek decision to join up with some friends that had planned a weekend trip south to Nanjing. We took an overnight train from Beijing on Friday night, and after 8 restless hours (we couldn't get sleeper tickets, only seats) we spilled onto the platform at Nanjing station. It was just before 6am, and after waiting in a damp, dark queueing area for 20 minutes (it looked like a great place to get stabbed) we got a cab and made our way to our hostel, the Sunflower Youth Hostel. Despite the deserted streets at 6am, we could tell that our area of town would be cool, with lots of shops and restaurants and cool architecture.

Our 7-person group (Cathy, Hilary, Katie, Eric, José, Andrew, and myself) checked into our 8-person room, which featured 4 closely packed bunk beds but was clean and warm. After a few of us grabbed some jianbing for breakfast outside, we took a nap and woke up around 9:30 to a steady blizzard.

Our first idea was to head to the historic mountain that overlooks the city, where this month the National Plum Blossom Festival is being held (Nanjing is apparently well known for them). We took a cab across town, and found a small ticket booth, where we were told that admission to the festival (essentially a grove of trees) was 120kuai. When converted to American dollars, this price may not seem bad (and certainly wouldn't have seemed bad to us in Week 1 or 2), but once you've lived in China for a while you get an idea of how much the average Chinese citizen spends in a day, and 120 kuai was a little ridiculous. After getting on the wrong bus in a failed attempt to reach another, cheaper entrance, we decided to call an audible. We would get it over with, we would do what every tourist to Nanjing doesn't really want to do but feels obligated to do; we went to the Nanjing Massacre Museum. It was snowing, it was gross outside, so we figured we might as well get the depressing part over with.

Depressing it was, and I'll spare you the details, but it was sad. As a much-needed pick-me-up we copped out and had an American fast food lunch before going back to the hostel to change for the night. Dinner was at a local restaurant that served traditional Nanjiing cuisine, which featured a good deal of seafood and the local specialty, salty duck. Afterwards, we walked around the area outside our hostel, which turned out to be a vibrant, exciting area full of night markets and music. We toured the Nanjing Confucius Temple, which was hosting a New Year's light display. The lights were a bit tacky, but made for some good pictures.

Later that night we went to an area of town mysteriously identified only as "1912." There we found the standard array of clubs and bars, and by around 1:30am we were ready to head back towards the hostel. After changing into some more comfortable clothes, we went upstairs and hung out in the comfortable top floor lounge, where there was a pool table, some couches, and a guitar...all the cliché hostel accessories. All we were missing was some Europeans with body odor and large backpacks. In the lounge we passed the time by manipulating a series of floor lamps to create odd lighting situations and then having a photo shoot with José's cool camera. The strange results can be seen on Snapfish or Facebook.

The next morning we each grabbed some weird breakfast from a market across the square, where Cathy enjoyed some octopus and squid. I was happy to try a piece of most anything that other people ate, but was not willing to buy one of my own...I waited for a coffee from McDonald's. Our first tourist activity of the day was the mausoleum of Sun Yat-Sen, an important political figure in Chinese history. The mausoleum sits on the side of a scenic mountain on the edge of town (the same mountain we had tried to find the previous day), and we were all too happy to be outside on what had turned out to be a beautiful Sunday.

The mausoleum was positioned at the top of a massive, gradually ascending path, which eventually gave way to several hundred steeper stairs. The building on top commands an awesome view of the mountain, the forests below, and the giant city in the distance (Nanjing is a small city by Chinese standards, but still has 7 million people and a massive skyline). We explored the gardens behind the mausoleum and found some of the famed plum blossoms we'd heard so much about. We were glad we'd saved our kuai the day before.

After making our way back down the hill, we took a free shuttle ride to the Linggu Temple, which sat just around the bend on the other side of the mountain. The "Temple" park actually consists of a number of buildings and sights, all of which are connected by beautiful paths that lead up the mountain from one to the next. There are lakes and gardens, the famous "Beamless Hall" which was built without wood thanks to a timber shortage, the Linggu Temple itself, and the fantastic Linggu Pagoda on top of the hill. We would have been happy to walk up the trails, but we found a better way; we rented electric scooters at the bottom. The scooters were hilarious, some fast, some slow. Cathy, from Brooklyn, did not know how to ride a bike and watching her struggle was quite amusing (sorry, Cathy). We scooted up the hill and enjoyed the sights and the beautiful weather, which was still warm as the sun slowly descended over the hills. We climbed to the top of the pagoda and agreed: we liked Nanjing.

Before heading back to Beijing (either by plane or train...I flew), we ate dinner in a small family restaurant. Apparently the restaurant specialty was dog, but we steered clear and ordered more conservative dishes like snail (?). It turns out that to eat snails one must suck them out of their shell; I found this gross but tried throughout the dinner. I never actually succeeded, and I don't think I'm going to be attempting to hone my skills any time soon.

José, the Venezuelan, is always willing to use his basic Chinese friends in often futile attempts to win Chinese friends. These frequency of these efforts increases significantly whenever we are at a restaurant and have a waiter or waitress. After greeting his target, José deploys his go-to phrase, "the icebreaker" as he calls it: 你是不是我的朋友？ Ni shi bu shi wo de pengyou? Are you, or are you not my friend?