Nanjing

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Well the trip to nanjing entailed taking another train which in it self is an experience which I must say I wouldn’t be able to complete without my chinese speaking girlfriend. The chinese, I find are very poor at forming queues ( lines if your american ) and I have noticed that the only way a line is formed is if there are actual barriers made so people have to stay within them. I have become very good at telling people to get behind me or just pulling there arm away if they try to hand over money before me.
So, we got the ticket to nanjing which is about an hour away from Shanghai. We had set off late to get the train and so we arrived at nanjing in the evening where I was very aware of the cold that hit me. We had seen a sign for a hotel called the lovely inn. The price was cheap so we decided to go look for it. As if by luck a woman who was harrassing people to stay at a hotel. It turned out that it was the lovely inn so she walked us to the hotel which we would never have found without her it was down a dark alley and we seemed to walking through what appeared to be a furniture store. But we arrived at the hotel and it was nice enough and had free internet so we couldn’t complain.
After settling in we were hungry and had passed a lot of cheap looking restaurants so we ventured out to see them and we found a small little place where the woman was very nice and helped out Becca when she was trying to find out if a dish was spicy which , if you know us would not be very good for us. But we got our usual meal which if you read my past entries will know what it is. And unfortunately , they were both very spicy dishes and there’s nothing funnier than watching each other eat something that’s way too hot. The way your nose starts to run and your eyes start to water is so attractive in the person that you love :P . when we had eaten we went back to the room and took a well deserved rest as travelling is a lot more tiring than you may expect.
A little history about Nanjing is that it translates into English as South ( Nan ) capital ( jing) so if you haven’t already guessed Beijing means north capital. So back in the day Nanjing used to be the capital city of china but like many asian countries the capitals never seem to stay in one place.
Our first stop in Nanjing was the mausoleum of Dr. San Yut Sen who was the founding father of modern china. He apparently was responsible for starting the movement which ended 100’s of years of emperor rule in China. Pretty much what Lenin was to Russia. We arrived at the area which was definitely set out for tourists there were free busses to take you to different entrances but when you got there you had to buy a ticket for entry to one thing or another. We bought the ticket to go and see the mausoleum and the beamless hall. Now we went through a 500m walkway to a huge gate. The cold was ridiculous and the wind was not great as we were on a mountain side. Now one thing you should know is that when it gets cold for some reason my right hip goes a bit tight. Not too painful but still a bit uncomfortable. As we got to the end of the walkway to this gate we walked some stairs and my hip felt a bit weird. I thought we were there and through the other side of this gate was the mausoleum so in my infinite wisdom said
“I’m glad there’s no more stairs , I don’t think I could do them today” . as we walked around this huge gate I walked out into the open and my jaw hit the floor. What lay in front of me were 392 ( I counted) stairs going up to this building where I’m guessing the good Dr was lying. So we set off with Becca smirking along the way. The cold and wind was getting worse by the second and all I had was a hoody and fleece. I made it to the mausoleum and it was nice but I was more impressed with the building rather than the tomb. The effort that went into building it and transporting his body from across the country for his final resting place and it was kind of just a white tomb with nothing else much in there.
We dealt with the steps once more and walked around the area and decided to go and see the beamless hall which was a building built without any beams running through the roof so I was expecting a grand room with nothing in it like pillars and it would be a technological marvel. However this was not the case. It seemed that indeed there were no beams , but instead huge walls inside holding up the roof and they had formed three long corridor shaped rooms which had now been turned into a museum depicting the change from imperial china to modern china. I was a little disappointed with the building but the surrounding gardens were nice but this wind was now freezing and we were told it was a nice sunny minus 7 ( if you are American I am using the celcius system so you will have to figure it out yourself ) but yes needless to say it was bloody cold. And bought a coffee were we asked for a cup of boiling water just to hold the cup to warm our hands up.
We went to another pagoda which was a few hundred years old and the name has slipped my mind but all I remember is the howling wind blowing through as we were hundreds of feet up in a tower that in turn, was on the side of a mountain. So my only thought at the time was about the tower blowing over in this wind. Once we had eventually come down the tower and once again lost the feeling in our fingers we decided that it was time to go home and we walked down to the bus stop and had to wait so long for the bus but when we got on there you would think that we had been left in the arctic for the last month in nothing but a swim suit. But it felt nice is what I’m trying to say.
The bus eventually made it back and we trundled back to the hotel and got warm we then went back to the restaurant where we asked for the same but without the spice and I was sorry to say it was the second meal we had had that tasted pretty poor. I don’t know what it was but the eggplant just tasted awful and the texture was totally different too. We were glad after the day to just get to bed and relax.
Our final day in Nanjing was quiet really so we stayed in for the morning which is nice to try and get in every now and then , we then ventured to get bus tickets to Tianjin which is around 80km from Beijing. This journey is an overnight train so it meant that :-
A. We were sleeping on the train that night.
B. We had the rest of the day to explore Nanjing .
We had got sorted out at about 1pm so after we had eaten we ventured off to the Nanjing museum. We got the subway which only has one line and got off in the city centre and started to walk towards the museum. We had stopped just to see if we were going the right way and we were but the museum was just nowhere to be found. Each time we asked people they were saying that we just carry on walking this way. The lonely planet guide said that the museum closed at 5 30 so we knew we would have a short time when we got there. We walked for about an hour and a half looking for the place and we recognised were we were when we got there. It was a building that we had passed the day before on the bus to the mountain. And we had walked pretty much up to the base of it from the city centre. To make matters worse it was now 4 30 so we now had an hour, or so we thought as a woman came up to us and told us they were now closing !!!!
So we made our way back to the hotel this time stopping at the first bus stop we found and then we waited in the cold once more for a bus that seemed to never ever come. We got back eventually and got a quick dinner and finally made our way to the train station. Writing this down it’s now quite funny what happened and I’m sure if you read this you’ll be laughing so I might as well join you.
Im actually writing this right now on a plain from Beijing to Bangkok but you’ll find out about that later on .

Next stop Tianjin !!!!!!!!!
Peace x

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Comments

[Laury Wooden]

Toni, I am having fun trying to picture you towering over the Chinese tourists as you try to get them to stay behind you in a queue! I had another laugh about the spicy food ;-) And the pagoda on the side of the mountain... what's a bit of wind after a few hundred years of being buffeted by wind? The Chinese must be architect geniuses!