Nanjing

Nanjing

We just returned from a weekend in Nanjing. Our friends Dane and April suggested the excursion; Dane is a classmate of ours in the LL.M. program and mostly fluent in Chinese, while his wife April has been working here in China for the Olympic broadcasting company. The weekend was a lot of fun, although it started with some difficulties on the overnight train from Beijing to Nanjing.

For those of you who are unaware, it is somewhat of a crap shoot when it comes to overnight sleeper cars in China. You can only book tickets up to five days in advance on some of the more popular routes, and inland destinations will only allow for even less advanced purchases. Also, there's quite a bit of demand for bottom bunks in the four-bed, soft-sleeper cabins. So, as the four of us bought four tickets for a Friday train on Thursday afternoon, we could not get bunks in the same room. Strike one.

Everything seemed fine when we got to our cabin. But then things took a turn for the worse after the lights went out for the evening, in that our middle-aged roommate on the bottom bunk apparently suffered from the worst case of sleep apnea in mainland China. In other words, Mr. Lumber Mill snored like a chainsaw with a busted choke. Strike two.

At about three in the morning, Katie decided that she couldn't take it. So she leaned over the edge of the bunk and yelled, "stop snoring!!" And despite Mr. Mill's lack of English skills, it seemed to work. Within twenty minutes, however, as if on cue, the other guy in the cabin started snoring loudly. Strike three.

So after seven hours listening to our iPods, we arrived in Nanjing to a rainy Saturday morning. Despite the overcast skies, everything after our arrival was smooth sailing: somehow one of Dane's friends from church hooked us up with a driver for the day, and the driver took us around to all of the sights in a sweet minivan with a bright-red racing stripe. Our driver was a PLA veteran and Party member, so it seemed as if he could park anywhere he wanted. Also, he really liked some sort of dish made from pig head, stating that it should only be eaten with a certain brand of beer from Jiangsu province. (We took his word for it.) But when Dane asked him if he had tried San Zhi Er ("Three Screams"), he said that was gross.

N.B. "Three Screams" refers to a dish once served in China that involved eating newborn mice. The first scream occurred when you grabbed them with chopsticks. The second scream occurred upon dipping the mouse in hot oil. The third scream occurred when you took a bite.

After a brief stop for an unfortunate breakfast at KFC that I won't belabor here, we headed off to the Botanic Gardens to enjoy the 2008 Nanjing International Plum Blossom Festival. It being Saturday, the place was overloaded with tourists from other provinces taking in the sights, just like us. In contrast to some other places we have been, however, the compound was completely devoid of Westerners. In fact, as compared to Shanghai and Beijing, there were significantly fewer expatriates in Nanjing, which made things kind of nice. So when yet another little kid walked up to us in the botanical gardens, pointed, and said "Weiguoren" ("foreigner!"), we could not argue.

After seeing the plum blossoms, we made our way to the top of Zijin Mountain. Most people walk to the summit up a winding path, but our driver decided that his minivan was up to it, so we did a little bit of off-roading while trying not to hit offending pedestrians. The summit was too overcast, so we came back down almost immediately.

Post-Mountain, we headed over to the "Japanese Devils Museum," which is how some in Beijing refer to the Memorial Hall of the Nanjing Massacre, for lack of being able to remember its Chinese name. (Which, for those who care, is 南京大屠杀纪念馆, or Nánjīng Dàtùshā Jìniàngguǎn.) It's truly an awesome place, in the sense that you become somewhat awestruck by the level of inhumanity displayed by the Japanese army during World War II when they invaded Nanjing. It's well worth a visit, but maybe not with your kids.

After all of the museum tours, it was off to dinner with Dane's contact in Nanjing. He picked us up from the hotel and took us to a traditional Chinese restaurant located in the Fuzi Miao area of Nanjing, which is kind of like the Pearl Street Mall in Boulder, except with a river, stinky tofu, and rickshaw rides. Dinner consisted of a number of local specialties, including duck blood soup, "tofu brains," and Nanjing pressed duck.

Following the meal, we enjoyed some lovely erhu playing by a member of the restaurant staff, and some less-than-lovely Chinese opera sung by another member of the restaurant staff who had clearly spent her tax refund on Botox.

After dinner we visited the Imperial Examinations History Museum. Throughout much of Chinese imperial history, one's performance on a detailed civil service examination defined future advancement within Chinese society. One of the places in which citizens could take this exam was located in Nanjing, and the Imperial Examinations History Museum attempts to depict the conditions of the exam, albeit with some seriously dated mannequins.

The following day was another marathon of museum visits, although 60 degrees and sunny. After enjoying some delicious French pastry, we went to the Sun Yat-sen memorial and the Presidential Palace. The highlights of the day included hearing the ring tone of a 60 year-old Shanghai grandmother at the Sun Yat-sen Memorial, which just so happened to be the Black Eyed Peas' "My Hump," and sliding down some steps with a couple of kids.

Overall, then, it was a great trip. Nanjing seems to be a much cleaner place than Shanghai or Beijing, and also a bit more authentically Chinese. So if you're looking for a place to visit in China that's not overrun by crowds, give Nanjing a shot.