Nanjing

Last weekend the Chinese celebrated labor day, and most Chinese had 3 days free from work. In China people are rarely given days off, so for a lot of Chinese this is one of the few times a year, they can visit their family or do some touristic traveling. One of my Chinese friends invited me to join her and her friends to travel to Nanjing, and so I also did some traveling this weekend. Just like the Chinese.

I already went to Nanjing once and I found it a really nice city, although I also thought it was a bit too big and crowded. But I’m afraid I will have the latter with a lot of Chinese cities, cause I guess most cities here are just very busy with people. It was quite exciting to join the Chinese students on their trip to Nanjing, cause the ones I knew spoke very poor English to say the least. It’s a good thing my Chinese is improving a lot faster than I expected cause else communication with them would have been very difficult. Now it’s ok, as long as they speak slowly and use very simple words, I’m afraid they feel like talking to a child though. However I was glad to see that one of the students who I hadn’t met before spoke some decent English.

The first time I visited Nanjing, I went to the touristic old center of the city, a small Buddhist temple in a park and the 1912district to have diner. The 1912 district is a district with a lot of bars, restaurants and clubs, and this is the kind of district which doesn’t exist in Wuhu. Nanjing is only 2 hours by train from Wuhu, but the city feels very different from Wuhu. I think it’s simply because Nanjing is a lot richer and bigger than Wuhu. In Nanjing people dress themselves a lot better, there are traffic rules, there are Western restaurants, there are even a few other foreigners visible, at the train station you hear an English voice and the foreign language bookstore actually sells foreign books instead of English, Japanese and Korean study books, like the foreign language bookstore in Wuhu. Although I was happy to buy a few very handy Chinese study books at this store. Basically Nanjing is one of those big modern Chinese cities, while Wuhu is one of those provincial Chinese cities which desperately tries to be a modern city. They do this with naming everything modern, my apartment is called Modern long river and I work in the Modern foreign language training center. But calling everything modern does not really make it modern.

This Saterday we went to the Zhongshan national park, which is a scenic area in Nanjing. Actually the place consist of three scenic areas, of which we only visited two. Not much to my surprise this place turned out to be crowded with Chinese tourists and even a few foreign tourist. The bus ride to the park was horrible, I had the feeling that we were together with 200 sweating Chinese on one bus. Needless to say that it was impossible to sit. Unfortunately Nanjing is very big and this park is not very close to the train station, so this bus ride took about one hour. Which makes up for the most uncomfortable moment in China so far.

Chinese friends taking pictures.

Happily enough this horrible bus ride was more than worth it. The national park turned out to be a very nice place to visit. The first place we visited, the Ming tomb scenic area was nice and peaceful. It was nice to walk around there and to take photos. Yes that’s something Chinese tourists like to do. This meant that we were not walking that much, cause there had to be taken pictures about everything which looked interesting. And in my opinion also a few times at not so interesting places. The second scenic area we visited included the tomb of emperor Sun Yatsen on a hill, and this one was more impressive. It was a long climb on the stairs to his tomb, but I liked the architecture and it was really good to see something more historical in China. And the view of Nanjing on top of the hill was nice as well. Although this should be better when the weather is less cloudy. Because one of my Chinese friends had some connection with someone who is in charge of this national park, we didn’t had to pay the entrance fee. Which is just one of the advantages of traveling together with Chinese friends.

On Sunday we went to the Nanjing massacre memorial, which was interesting to see, but not really a nice place to visit. I had mixed feelings about the place, it was nice to learn a bit more about the 2^nd world war in China but I found it all a bit too one sided. The museum showed the unsatisfied attitude of China towards recognition of the massacre from Japan. At almost every sign in the museum you could read who was responsible for these cruel inhuman actions, and those signs were in Chinese, English and Japanese. The last one is useless in my opinion, cause Japanese people should know better than to visit this place.

I had a great weekend and I enjoyed my second trip to Nanjing a lot. I like to live in Wuhu, but sometimes it’s good to get out of Wuhu and see something of the more developed China. It was also very interesting to travel together with Chinese students and I got more than enough practice with speaking Chinese for this week. I guess now it’s time to learn some new words, cause my vocabulary level is just too small to get to the real interesting conversations.