Nanjing hen hao!

I know that in my last post, I said that I was going to Shanghai, but it turns out I was only there for a grand total of 4 hours. At midnight the night before/day we left for China, my friend Jenny calls me up (I had just turned off my lights) and says that they want to only go to Nanjing because a weekend is too short of time to visit two cities. Thank goodness I agreed, because Nanjing was so much fun, and there's no way it coulda been done in less time.

Photos can be found here.

The trip was great. I didn't know 3 of the girls very well although I had met two of them before. (Heck, the one girl, Hong, was in two of my classes, but I could never remember her name.) But, like most trips, by the end of it, we were great pals.

I started off the trip a little better than the other girls, because I got by far the most sleep. I probably fell asleep by 1am, (had to get up at 4:15) but according to the other girls, they only got an hour of sleep. (I dunno how they survived.) In fact, Jenny was late because she had stayed up until 3am applying to an internship and slept in. Thahn actually phoned her to wake her up.

Because we had changed our travel plans so late, we ended up having to fly into Shanghai anyways. We immediately travelled to the train station to buy our train tickets to Nanjing. Unfortunately we had to waste 3 hours before our train departed, so we decided to go grab some lunch.

Amusing anecdote: Mel's totally right. The more education we get, the dumber we become. On the plane ride over, we got lunch. In the lunch kit were buns and crackers. I was inspecting our crackers and saw that the date on the package was 2006-01-15! I was like, "Oh my god! They're serving us expired food!" (I never put anything past the Chinese.) The other girls checked out their food too, and we realized that most of it had expired. About 5 minutes later, Marja brilliantly suggested that maybe it was the production date instead.... Duh. At least I wasn't the only one thinking it was bad food.

This is where the fun began. We were trying to find a famous street of good restaurants, but no one knew where it was, and they were too embarassed or nervous about asking for directions. By now, most of you know that my mantra is "Screw it, they'll never see me again." So Mau brushed off her mandarin, got Jenny to repeat the street name we were looking for a few times, and then grabbed the nearest local and asked, "请问，Nanjingshi路在哪里？" (Hmm, not sure if thatwill show up on your browswer, those are chinese characters saying "May I ask where Nanjingshi road is?" Hee! People actually understood me!!! You have no idea how excited I was by that. Of course, when they replied to me, I didn't have a freakin' clue as to what they were saying. Luckily three of the girls in my group are better at mandarin, so they could at least answer me.

We rapidly discovered that me, the white chick, got much better responses from the locals than they, the asians did. It's sad though because whenever the asian girls asked for directions, people were very abrupt or just less polite in general. Very strange. When I asked though, they'd be very kind and would go out of their way to get us to our destination. (Okay, not all the time, but Jenny agreed that I got much better responses.)

We ended up getting to the Nanjingshi Road, but decided not to waste time looking for a restaurant. Instead we backtracked to where we started and I got to ask a guy "Nar you yige haochi de fandian?" (Where had a tasty restaurant?) Hee. He directed us to this big fancy restaurant. The restaurant was funny though. The staff seemed almost shocked to see they had customers. They had been sitting around a big table yapping away, and had to rush around to prepare seats for us. We're guessing that the restaurant was meant for big parties rather than groups of 5. We only got two dishes, because after they brought out the second dish, they informed us they didn't have the ingredients for the others. Doh.

Fast forward to the train ride. Oh my gosh, space is such a valuable commodity. We're still not sure why, but the train was overly full - there weren't enough seats for everyone! I dunno if the people paid tickets to get on the train and stand, or whether the train was overbooked (apparently the train tickets are good for 2 days). Anyways, our little group got seats, but the car was roasting, and there were people squashed in the aisle beside us. (Some chick was sitting on Marja's armrest.)

3 hours later we arrived in Nanjing. All I noticed at first was the cold. It was about 1-5 degrees there. Cold cold cold. Yeah yeah, I know, it's not as bad as Canada, but cold cold cold for people used to Hong Kong. (Heh, right now it's 15 degrees and I'm still thinking it's cold.) One of the girls had made reservations at a hotel right by the train station so we made our way over there. Egads, I just bitched about the cold, and now I'm about to do the same about the heat. We couldn't control the heat in our room - we had to prop the window open and even then, we didn't sleep with blankets on.

Rather than just chilling at the hotel for the rest of the evening, we hopped on the subway and made our way to famous street in Nanjing - Hunan Road. It was a pretty shopping area. Lots of sports stores, and then we found a restaurant alley. There were lots of wacky little chinese statues around and the like. We ended up going to a random little DELICIOUS dumpling restaurant. Unfortunately it was nearly closing time, so we had to rush. (They actually started turning off the lights around us.) That was it for the first night.

Travelling in China is wack. I dunno the reasons, but the next day, our first stop was having to go to a travel agent in Nanjing to pick up our return airplane tickets. We ended up getting to walk around downtown Nanjing hunting down our travel agency (accidentally walked by it into a clinic - eek! I've got SARS now!). We then had to pay for our return tickets (they had been booked by not paid for yet) - very strange.

Anyways, after the travel agency, we hunted down a place for breakfast/lunch. We accidentally found a famous restaurant in our guide book so went there. It was ridiculously expensive, and I don't know enough about chinese food to know the different between normal and good chinese food, so it was a bit of a waste, albeit a delicious waste. :)

After our brunch, we started to walk to the Nanjing Memorial. For those of you who aren't aware, Nanjing was once the capital of China, and in WWII, was the site of a massacre by Japanese troops. The Memorial was the only thing on my wishlist that I really wanted to visit, so that's why it was our first stop. This is when the madness of public transit began. To make a long story short, we walked half way to the memorial before finding out it was a long freakin' walk. We then got on 3 wrong buses, had to backtrack several times and so on. We did make it though. Barely. And poorer for all the wastes bus fares. :(

The Memorial was a bit anti-climatic for me. I was expecting it to be more like a museum, but it was much more artsy and the like. They had all kinds of "representations" and stuff like that. (e.g. they mimicked a mass grave by spreading around a bunch of white washed stones and had barren trees sticking out it.) It wasn't terribly impartial (a lot of the plaques had sentences like, "Who could imagine such cruelty existed?!" which is an understandable question, but rather impartial nonetheless). There were actual skeletons on display in one section, but it failed to drive home the gravity of the massacres that occurred. They also did have a more informational section, but I only got to see about half of it because the other girls decided they wanted to leave. I don't blame them - it was a very sad and depressing display. Which was the point of course. Still.

We then managed to make our way back to downtown in an effort to find a place known as Confuscius's Temple. (Why can't I spell Confucious correctly???) We felt silly asking for directions, because all the stores/shops around us were called "Confucious Temple something something shop." We ended up arriving in this great little shopping area - very chinesish. We walked around for about 20 minutes looking for the actual temple before Thahn finally tackled a local and asked for directions. Queue stupid traveller moment: Turns out that "Confuscious' Temple IS a shopping district and that there is NO temple there. Whoops!

We chilled at "Fu Zi Miao" (Confuscious' Temple) for a bit longer, then decided to wander around the area some more. To shorten the story, we wandered around long enough to realize there were no museums open anymore and get lost. We wandered around random streets and ended up BACK at Confuscious' Temple. Whoops. This time there were pretty lights on because it was night. Shiny Chinese lights make me happy no matter where or when. We ended up finding another branch of the dumpling restaurant we ate at the night before and filled ourselves back up. So yummy!

Amusing anecdote: Chinese people are horribly bad for cutting in front of you in any kind of line. At Confuscious' Temple, the main source of bathrooms were at either KFC or McDonald's. Thahn and I went to a KFC to use their toilets. Unfortunately there was like a 15 person line for the 2 squatters. Anyways, when Thahn and I were about 4 people from the toilets, two chicks squeezed through the line and pretended they needed to use the sinks. They then stood there, looking for areas to cut the line. I told Thahn, "There ain't no way those biatches are cutting front of me." I then practically started humping the lady in front of me in line in an attempt to maintain my spot in line. :) Thahn also grabbed ahold of my purse so they couldn't squeeze between her and I. We made it to the toilets safely, but the girls had managed to squeeze in right behind Thahn and I. And to top things off, Thahn deliberately took her time in the toilet in order to piss off the one chick who bugged us the most. LOL.

Another amusing anecdote: While at Fu Zi Miao, I wanted to buy a lollipop. I walked up to a vendor and asked them in chinese how much it cost. They just stared at me for a second and then started beckoning for a co-worker to come and help talk to me. I was like, "Why the heck can't they understand me??? I spoke in Chinese!" That's when I realized, I spoke in Cantonese - not mandarin! LOL. Thahn, a cantonese speaker just about died laughing when she heard me. Thanks to my goofup though, I got the lollipop for 2RMB cheaper. :)

The next day we got up extra early (well, we tried, but with 5 girls, that's a huge feat - we were only running 20 minutes behind schedule though). We then got instructions on how to get to the Ming Tombs and Sun-Yat Sen's mausoleum... Queue more confusion and getting lost. We managed to get on 4 different buses, and kept getting off at the wrong stops. Well, the last bus we got on actually dropped us off in the right area, but some passerby gave us bad directions and we had to walk down the road instead. (Actually, when the person realized that we HAD been at the right area, he ran down the road after us and offered to show us back to where we wanted to go - but we were closer to another sight instead.)

We ended up going to Sun Yat-Sen's Mausoleum and some random tombs. The Mausoleum was just a big-ass set of stairs with a single building at the top. Very frustrating to find that out AFTER you climbed up them. But it was still super pretty, because the mausoleum was built on a mountain, so you could see Nanjing in the distance.

As for the tombs, I was a bit lost at them, because I had no idea about who lived there, what they did, or even their name. I'm just calling them the Ming tomb because I vaguely remember that name from something. The tomb was pretty with lots of random buildings and the like. Nothing terribly special about it though. (Although a group of random highschool girls said hi to me just for kicks.)

Amusing anecdote: Hong and I had walked far ahead of the group. We were trying to find the actual tombs (in Beijing, we actually got to see them tombs). She and I saw a path leading up the hill and a sign saying it was the Treasure Mound and that beneath the hill was the tomb. Well, foolishly we though that by walking up the path, we'd find something to see. 30 minutes later, and a very out-of-breath-Mau later, we finally stopped and realized the path merely walked through the forest along the stone wall surrounding the tomb. I promptly refused to walk any further. (Turns out Marja, Jenny, and Thahn had stopped at the bottom of the hill and were waiting for us.)

Finally we returned to the city centre and had another yummy meal (although the fish dish nearly killed us because of all the bones in it!). That was the last of our adventure. We promptly hopped on a bus to grab our plane and returned to Hong Kong. One amusing anecdote from the trip is my return into HK. While I was in line to get my passport stamped, the chick couldn't find the right stamp. I also peeked through the glass and saw it, so I pointed at it and told her in cantonese "This one" and she started laughing. That's it.

The last thing I need to say is egads! I need to apply for a new passport soon! I've only got 3 blank pages left in my passport!!! :( And I looked up the info on the net, and I can't get extra pages added - I *have* to apply for a new passport. That's a biatch. :( (HK gives students a huge half-page stamp everytime you enter and leave the country.)