West Capital

Erich and I traveled to Nanjing this weekend. The trip was initiated by a conference that I attended and we thought, why not Erich join and relax/explore somewhere new too? So we took the 5 hour train ride to China’s old, Western capital city andhere are a few things to share that we found fun and interesting (almost none of which you would find in a guidebook). Really, it’s the little things that entertain us.

1) On the train ride there, upon exploring the reading materials in the backs of the seats, we stumbled upon this image. Of course I get what they were trying to convey. However, the placement of that watering can is not well thought out. On top of that, it doesn’t help that on the average day walking around the streets of Beilun you will see your fair share of people relieving themselves in the middle of a busy public street in this exact position. It kept us amused for a good 10 minutes of the train ride…then we had to find other ways to entertain ourselves for the other 4 hours and 50 minutes.

2) We love the subway. Any city we go to in China that has one, we ride it often and wish there were more around here. It makes getting around so easy and much faster/cheaper than taxis. Plus, you always make interesting conversations with locals who want to practice their English. We were offered a small gift (something that looked like a wooden ornament) this time, but kindly turned it down. Anyway, Nanjing had a subway system that was very small and less crowded compared to those of Beijing or Shanghai, but we took this video of a typical ride on the line. Trust me, this is not at all crowded compared to what we’ve experienced in the bigger cities. We’ll have to record video in Shanghai next time we go. Have you seen the YouTube videos of subway security literally packing crowds in like sardines? Kind of like that. Erich likes to play, “who showered this morning?” by sniffing out culprits.

3) After the conference, we did findtime one day to visit ZhongShan park. It was HUGE and very beautiful/peaceful by Chinese standards. It was the first time I saw tents and picnics set up like we’re used to in the States. This park is also the site of Sun Yat-Sen’s mausoleum as well as the burial site for several other famous Chinese leaders. Sun Yat-Sen is the “Father of the Nation” and was China’s first official President in 1912. I guess you could think of him as China’s George Washington? Anyway, there was a building on a large hill that you could climb up with several hundred other Chinese tourists to pay your respects. So up we went, step by step to the top. Along the way up, at the top and down, we must’ve been stopped by at least 10 groups who wanted photos with us. This is fairly common practice and we typically joke around with them that it’s 5 yuan per photo. After several peace signs, arms around each other and “qie zi”’s (sounds like “cheese” when you say it, but translates to mean “eggplant”), my cheeks hurt. Who knew we’d be the local celebrities of Sun Yat-Sen’s final place of rest? Also at the top, we saw these gnarly trees that were pretty cool looking. After a closer look, we concluded that the top of the tree was actually the root system of one tree turned upside down and grafted to the trunk of another tree. So essentially you had the two bottoms of two different trees grown together to create these new odd and fun looking trees.

In all, it was a fun and restful weekend away. Oh, and the conference was okay too J