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Published: June 30th 2010
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I spent a lazy morning packing and getting ready and then had an easy train ride into Nanjing, arriving mid afternoon. This time I travelled in a soft seat carriage, which generally meant bigger and more comfortable seats and fewer people. The train from Shanghai to Suzhou had been a hard seat and was just as manic and crammed full of people as the hard sleeper carriages had been.
I arrived in Nanjing with mixed feelings. I had spent most of my time in Suzhou alone because the people I met were generally couples and so I didn't feel I could intrude on their time, or tag along. Because of this I was feeling quite lonely and a bit out of it. The staring and the desire to get as much out of you as a tourist as possible, which at other times I am able to laugh off, were therefore starting to get to me. Add to that, Nanjing's reputation as a bit of a maudlin place after the Japanese invasion and occupation - called the rape of Nanjing, because of all the atrocities committed there - and the fact that it is rather an abandoned city and capital,
and I wasn't at my best.
I nevertheless managed to find the bus to the hostel, and checked in. The guidebook had warned me that the hostel I had chosen was "in need of refurbishment", but the clean but shabby accommodation did nothing to improve my mood. The hostel was in the predicament that I think affects many hostels, namely that the walls desperately needed repainting, but to do so would mean painting over the years of notes, graffiti and adages that fellow travellers and armchair philosophers had scrawled over them. In some cases, this would have been an improvement - there was a full-sized figure of a man on the wall just outside my room that I kept catching in the corner of my eye and jumping, thinking there was a real person there.
The room itself was very small, and the space was not capitalised on by the use of single beds rather than bunks. Also, it was a 4 bed dorm, and all the other occupants were men. As it turns out, they were all gentlemen and I had absolutely no problem; however there were awkward moments, not least because the only bathroom for the
Nanjing
Much of Nanjing resembles the architecture in Beijing - including this dragon screen (see the Forbidden City). whole hostel was on the floor below, necessitating various trips to change etc.
Needing to get out of the hostel and do something quickly, I headed for the shopping area immediately adjacent. The shopping area was buzzing with people - it being a Saturday - and at its heart was, of all things, a Confuscian Temple and the old civil service university - the one whose exams were supposed to be the hardest in the world.
I started by exploring the temple. There were some beautiful carved screens inside, showing various episodes from Confuscius's life. Unlike the temples I saw in Japan, this temple was surrounded by other buildings and the general trappings of modern society. This meant that instead of looking up into trees and woodland, you have views of rooftops and skyscrapers from the inner courtyards - which gives the temple quite a different feel.
The exit to the temple led, naturally enough, into a tourist tat market and I wandered through this and back to the main plaza. Since it was now getting late, I grabbed various intriguing looking samples of street food - including fried fermented tofu. Wherever you are in China, you
Prayer tree outside the Confuscian Temple
People bought the ribbons and metal weight and threw the ribbons into the tree. One girl I was watching had to try about 15 times before she succeeded. will pass a restaurant with fermented tofu. You can spot them by the smell - it smells as though they are fermenting them in stale urine. Fortunately, the smell translates only into a very faint aftertaste in the finished product, which disappointingly tasted of nothing other than the chilli sauce they sprinkle on it.
I sat myself down on a bench and did some people watching before going to bed.
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