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Published: December 11th 2010
We got the first week of October off for National Day, the anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China. I was very interested in celebrating this holiday, but it didn't seem like people do much for it, other than going home and enjoying the vacation. I guess last year was bigger because it was the 60th anniversary. Maybe more happens in Beijing. The nearby military base set off some fireworks and I could see them out my office window. Also lots of shops, government buildings, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences was decorated for the occasion, with big red lanterns and red banners wishing us all a happy National Day.
So I went to Nanjing to meet up with my CLS buddy Lauren who is currently a graduate student at Nanjing University. She's taking graduate classes in Chinese with native Chinese speakers... damn that must be tough. I really admire her! The high-speed train to Nanjing was super nice and comfy. There weren't people with standing tickets making it all crazy, so it was a relaxing journey. The weather was fantastic and I enjoyed looking out the window at the blue skies, farming and rolling bright-green hills
Pagoda
On our nighttime wanders.of central China. The train went at around 250 km/hr which was exciting, particularly when we passed another train!
That evening we tried to be tourists and go to Sun Yat-sen's mausoleum. Sun Yat-sen (Sun Zhongshan/孙中山 in Mandarin) was the co-founder and first leader of the Kuomintang/KMT (Guomintang/国民党), the party that overthrew the Qing emperor in 1911 and governed China until the Chinese Civil War between the western-supported KMT and the Soviet-supported Communist Part of China (CPC). As the KMT forces retreated to Taiwan, on October 1st, 1949 Mao Zedong declared the founding of the People's Republic of China. So I thought it was kind of funny that we ended up going to Sun Yat-sen's mausoleum during the holiday that kind of celebrates his party's defeat in mainland China! However it seems that today people honor him as well as a key figure in China's progress from an imperial government to the nation that it is today.
By the time we got to the park, the sun was already setting, so we embarked on an epic wander. There were technicolor pagodas lit up like Christmas, a badass lady with a huge blowtorch shaping cute little animals out of
glass, a walkway with many stone animals to climb on and pretend to ride, an exclusive party that we wanted to crash.... However, no sign of our dead revolutionary friend. Eventually we happened upon a quiet two-lane road. We saw some signs that promised the mausoleum up ahead and walked for a few miles. Finally we got there. There were signs around saying that it was closed. We decided that since it was dark and people couldn't see that we were foreigners, if we just walked around purposefully like we worked there, it would be fine. There were some groups of young people around and also many couples. Apparently Sun Yat-sen's mausoleum is a hot make out spot after dark. We took a cab back into town and went to a "German-style" place for beer and live music. We resisted dancing until they did a Lady Gaga cover and then I couldn't help myself. Lauren stayed strong. One of the singers was attractive. He was from the Philippines... maybe the whole band was.
The next day we took the bus to Lianyungang and made it to the beach. We set up our tent and wandered about. There were seashells
to collect and rocks to climb on. We also managed to get out at night to get some shaokao, beer and fire-starting supplies. We got the guy who sold us the beer to give us some of his spare cardboard boxes. We told them we wanted them for sleeping because the ground was cold. The guy's friend opened our beer bottles with his teeth. In Lianyungang we saw this one kind of beer, Prince Beer (王子啤酒), everywhere. It is advertised to be "brewed from pure water" which is sooo funny because Chinese beers are really weak (2.5% alcohol or less) and they do kind of taste like water!! Our fire was a grand success. I love the smell of burning wood. It was awesome to be out there warm by the fire with the sound of the ocean in the background.
We went to bed early so we could catch the sunrise in the morning. In the morning, we met up with a group of Chinese college students also looking for the sunrise. We got stuck with one weird guy who got sick of walking and then tried to tell his friends that he was stopping because we had!
We finally made it to an amazing lookout at the top of a short cliff next to the ocean. Watching the sun rise over the Pacific Ocean - now that is something you can't do in America! It was cool to think that California and our wonderful home country was just over that body of water. After a nap, we hit the aquarium, which had a fantastic selection of poorly cared for sea creatures. It looked so small and crappy from the outside, but the small front building actually led to a long tunnel that went through a mountain. They also had tried their hand at some sea creature taxidermy with sick and comical results.
Then we headed to Huaguoshan/花果山 (flower-fruit mountain). Its modest Jade Maiden peak is the highest in Jiangsu and also it is the famed birthplace of the Monkey King, a main character in the Journey to the West/Xi You Ji/西游记. Journey to the West is one of the four great classical novels of Chinese literature. It's about a monk that goes to India to obtain sutras. (On his journey he also passes through Xinjiang and describes the Flaming Mountain that Kayleigh and I visited earlier
in the year.) They also made a popular TV show out of the adventures in the novel. On our way up the mountain, we could see many rice terraces carved into nearby hills. We found the exact place where the Monkey King apparently was born from the rocks. We also made it to the famed Water Curtain Cave, also described in Journey to the West. It was a really cool, long cave, lit by Christmas lights. The entrance to the cave was behind a waterfall!
We were most of the way up the mountain when the sun started to set, so we set up our tent next to a pagoda and went to bed. In the morning, we heard voices outside. We imagined emerging from the tent to an audience of 20 Chinese people staring at the weird camping laowais and we hardly dared to exit. It wasn't so bad though, just one woman who was supposed to be sweeping the steps and had stopped her work to stand and stare. We got so much "laowai!" and "waiguoren" and "hello" on Huaguoshan...天啊... Anyway we continued our way up the mountain and quickly reached the peak. Also we found an
alien spaceship (weather measuring station).
That day we headed to our final destination of Kongwangshan/孔望山, a mountain that sounded way better on the internet than it was in real life. It wasn't even a mountain - took us less than an hour to hike up and down the whole thing. Plus the ancient Buddhist carvings and the stone elephant (lol see pic) were not all they were cracked up to be. We were going to camp there, but it was pretty boring, so we headed back into town to try and find a cheap hotel room. Lauren didn't have her passport with her so I thought surely we couldn't get a room. It was actually not a problem - the desk worker said we just needed to leave before the boss got there the next day or something. We had a night to kill and couldn't find any bars or nightlife, so we bought some big bottles of beer and wandered the town. Finally we came across a hair salon that was still open at 10 pm so I decided to get bright red streaks in my hair. The men who worked in the hair salon were far prettier
than either of us haha. They were fun and did a good job! The dye faded really fast though. Also that night I got the worst toothache ever. It was totally killing me, but usually I could ignore it and have a good time.
The next day we returned to Nanjing and went out for some awesome western food (nachos + mac and cheese), beer and hookah at a bar named Ellen's which was just like Helen's in Beijing. Apparently Wuhan has a Helen's as well. Those related bars have a fantastic warm/homey/hippie backpacker feel, a menu with everything a homesick expat could want, and pretty decent musical taste. Also Lauren accompanied me to the dentist to do something about the pain. The dentist used novocaine, drilled my tooth a bit and gave me medicine for the inflammation/infection. It was the beginning of what was to be a 7+ (lost count) dentist trip root canal and crown extravaganza.
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