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.

A Bunch of Dead Guys on a Mountain

This past weekend we had Monday off for class since it was "Superbowl Monday" here in China (since we're half a day ahead, the Superbowl landed early on Monday morning for those interested in watching). Since Joe and I had zero interest in the Superbowl, we decided to plan a weekend trip to the nearby city of Nanjing, which was the old capital of China during some of the ancient dynasties. We bought train tickets a couple of weeks ago, which cost about $15-20 each way, so not too bad and the train was only a couple of hours. We left Friday night after classes and arrived in Nanjing around 11:30 pm. Here are some pictures of the train station here in Shanghai that we went through. It was huge and very organized which Joe and I were appreciative of. Since so many people here travel by train, it was almost run like an airport with security and big boards telling you where to go and wait. 

After boarding the train, I began talking to the man sitting next to me, who was from Nanjing and was travelling back to be with his family for New Years. He told me that he had learned English from the age of 12 but had never talked to a foreigner before, so he was very excited. He said it was "his honor" to talk to me and that his family would be very jealous. He was so nice that he helped us get a taxi once we were there and escorted us to our hostel to make sure we got in alright. Once we were there and had our room, he left to go and be with his family, but assured us that if we needed anything, we could call him any time. It was a very nice start to our trip to be welcomed with such enthusiasm.  Since we got there so late, we went straight to bed in preparation for the next day.

On Saturday, we decided to tackle the main tourist attraction in Nanjing, Purple Mountain. Not only is it a popular mountain to hike up and see the city, but it is also the home of the tombs used by many ancient dynasties and other historic sites as well. We had no idea what we were getting ourselves into when we first started, and decided that traveling by foot would allow us to see the most. As you can see by the map I'm looking at, it was a lot bigger than we expected. If this map was doubled in size to the right, that would be probably the area that we walked around throughout the day. We arrived at the mountain at 9am and didn't leave until 5pm. Needless to say, it was a tiring day, but also our favorite of the weekend. 

These are the signs that we followed along the path to the Ming Tombs and Sun Yat Sen's Mausoleum, the two big sites we wanted to see. We eventually made it to the Ming Tombs and found that there was a huge park surrounding it that you can walk through. 

This is one of the "sacred walkways" in the Ming Tomb area, lined with various animals believed to symbolize various different things. 

This is one of the old ladies that were around the park area doing stretches and Tai Chi throughout the day. I certainly can't do this at 20 years old, so I have no hope at her age. 

There were a bunch of these smaller pagodas scattered around with amazing artwork and architecture.

Each one was an old well.. here's Joe trying to pull off the top.

Us in front of the Ming Tomb entrance.

The "stairs" to get up the sides of the main building.. obviously the ancient Chinese people liked to work their calfs by walking uphill. 

Behind the temple was a path of stairs that lead to a "treasure mound". We were curious, so we decided to go up. It turned out that there were hundreds of stairs. Here's Joe waiting for me to come panting up the last few. It ended up being a waste of time as the only thing up there was more trees and grass. At least the walk back down was a lot easier. 

In another area of the park was dedicated to a guy named Sun Quan who was a part of the Three Kingdoms story that Joe read a few years ago. He was very interested and excited about looking at all of the artifacts that they had. I had no idea what any of it was about but it was interesting to see. 

This is a huge Jade statue in one of the rooms. Joe wants it for his future house. 

Our next destination was the Sun Yat Sen Mausoleum, one of the most famous sights in Nanjing. Sun Yat Sen was the founder of the People's Republic of China and the first President of the PRC. Here's Joe outside the entrance gate. 

Much to our delight, we found more stairs waiting for us to climb. 

This is the view from the top of all of those stairs. At the top was a statue in memorial of Sun Yat Sen and some people selling souvenirs. It was also a great place to people watch and get a great view of the city. 

Our next stop was a temple area to the side of the Sun Yat Sen Mausoleum, in which I found this turtle statue to hang out with. 

This pagoda was one of our favorite parts of the park. It was 8 stories high and they let you climb up a spiral staircase in the middle and go all the way to the top if you so desire. Of course, Joe desired and I followed despite my desire to avoid more stairs.

View from the top of the pagoda. 

There was also a really pretty tree that we took pictures of and a bunch of buildings to go into that were old and looked like nothing we have at home. 

At the base of the mausoleum, we found this scorpion liquor, a "Nanjing Specialty". We were intrigued to buy some just for the novelty, but once we discovered that there was a scorpion at the bottom of the bottom that you are supposed to eat at the end we passed. 

Lastly that day, we wanted to go to the peak of Purple Mountain to see the view of the whole city. We took a taxi over to the cable car station, the only way up other than to walk (not happening after all of the stairs and walking we did that day). We paid for a roundtrip ticket and hopped on. As you can see from my face, I am not a fan of chair lifts at all and was very uncomfortable for the first part. Since the whole ride took over 20 minutes, I settled down a little bit later, but I certainly wasn't happy about the ride. 

Once we got to the top, we were able to walk around and get the view of Nanjing from up above. Unfortunately, it was kind of a cloudy day and the smog in the area makes it hard to see the buildings clearly in the pictures, but you can take our word for it that it was an impressive view. 

Up at the top of the mountain is this giant Buddha statue that you can only imagine took someone more than a few trips up the mountain to carve in the past. 

Overall, it was a great first day and we were completely exhausted by the time we got down the mountain at 5. Unfortunately, when we came down we were in an entirely different area than we started, so we couldn't find our way back to the metro line. No cabs seemed to want to pick us up for whatever reason, so we asked multiple hotel front desks but none of them could understand what we were trying to find. Eventually, one pointed us to a bus that would lead us in the right direction of our hostel, so we hopped on. After asking people on the bus if we were going the right way, we were skeptical, so at the first sign of a metro station we got off and took the train as we are much more comfortable with that. It turned out we were only one station away from where we started, but not knowing the city didn't make it easy for us to figure that out. The whole adventure of trying to get to the metro took about an hour, but finally we were able to make it back to our hostel in one piece.