Confucius Says

On Sunday, we woke up with very tight calf muscles and shin pain, so it took us a while to get up and running. We went out in search of a park that was supposed to be in the area, but couldn't find it. It didn't help that we didn't have a map of the area that was in English, but that's besides the point. We ended up finding a completely different park, but went in anyway to look around. The whole thing was decked out for New Years like everything else in Nanjing and it was full of old statues that had been put there.

One of many New Years floats on the river 

Artsy statue shot number 1 (there are many many more, mostly not posted)

Most of the park area. What's really cool in most places similar to this is that it's surrounded by city, but it's very quiet and serene inside. This particular one was filled with older people practicing Tai Chi and singing opera to each other which was fun to observe.

The only picture I think I'll get of the lions facing each other. I love the expressions on their faces as well. 

Artsy statue picture number 2

After leaving the park, we went out to find the Nanjing Museum, which is supposed to be one of the biggest museums in China. We got to the right metro stop and got out and asked many people where it was. They kept pointing us back and forth down this one street, which we finally realized was the right one. The confusing part was that we couldn't find a museum, just a whole bunch of construction. It turns out, the construction was the museum- they're tearing it down and rebuilding it. Strike one for Sunday. We regrouped and went to the big metropolitan shopping area instead, where we found this huge underground market called "fashion lady". It was full of neon lights and various scarves, headbands and bows.

We then decided to go and find an antique market that we had found the information for online. We had the Chinese name and characters in a picture on Joe's camera, so we found a cab and showed it to him and he welcomed us into his cab. Once we got going, he started asking us a bunch of questions in Chinese, to which we communicated the best we could that we had no idea what he was trying to tell us. His response was to write the characters down for us, which was largely unhelpful seeing as if we don't understand what he's saying, we will surely not understand what he's writing. After taking us to a weird alley, we decided to ditch the antique place and go back to our hostel. We confused him by telling him a different place, but when he got us there, he was very happy that we were happy with our destination. The whole adventure cost us maybe $2 and a lot of frustration, but it was also pretty comical dealing with the taxi driver. Strike 2 for Sunday. After failing to find another one of our destinations, we took a couple of hours to lie down in our hostel and rest our tired legs. 

That evening, we went to the wall that surrounds most of Nanjing. It was used for protection in ancient towns, but is now more of a tourist attraction than anything. The big gate by our hostel was decked out for New Years, so we went up to the top of it and looked at the city at night. We also walked through this recreation old-style town that they were setting up for their celebrations in the coming weeks. From what we could tell, this road is usually empty except for when they have celebrations which is kind of interesting considering the general lack of space in China. 

Decorations in the recreation town.

Gate to the Nanjing wall.

This is one of many little passageways within the wall, where soldiers used to hide and store their supplies when enemies were coming. 

View of the city at night, blurred by a lot of lights from various decorations. 

After exploring the wall, we went back to the area around our hostel, called the Confucian Temple. Temple is an odd word to describe it since Confucianism isn't exactly a religion and the area doesn't have many aspects of a temple, but it was cool nonetheless. It is this huge night market area filled with stalls and food that was a lot of fun to explore. We also went in to the actual Confucian area, where they had lanterns and decorations everywhere around the Confucius statue. 

View of the river running through the Confucian Temple area. 

Confucius statue

Some of the decorations for New years.

Inside one of the temples there was thousand of these ornaments, all with people's writing on them, we're presuming that they put them there in hopes of good luck and prosperity in the coming year.

One of many snake decorations in honor of the year of the snake. 

Joe ringing the bell at the temple. 

We get a lot of stares when we mess around with the statues, but it's more fun than just looking at them.

At the end of the night, we took a boat tour along the river that runs through Nanjing. It went back through the park we were in earlier, so we got to see all the bridges and lanterns lit up with neon lights. One problem we had with it was the recording of a Chinese lady talking about the history of the area, which we obviously didn't understand a word of. Not only did we have that blaring above us, but all the other Chinese people on our boat were yelling at each other over it, so it was a huge amount of noise. Other than that, it was a nice tour around the river and surrounding area.