Nanjing

Hello from Nanjing!

I’m writing from my second day in my solo trip through China, and I couldn’t be better. It’s amazing how easy and cheap it is to do what I’m doing; my room last night was $5 American, shared with four other students from the States and Israel. The staff has been friendly and helpful, and Nanjing is an incredibly navigable city.

I think I’ve found an excellent way of traveling about. The things I’ve seen already have made the wait for my passport so very worth it. A few highlights so far:

1) Strolling through the pedestrian area around my hostel. A renovated Confucian temple sits in the middle of a bright, pretty commercialized zone in the middle of the city. Though a bit on the kitschy side, it’s really lively at night, with snack shops abound. At just one such snack shop, in fact, I had my first pig’s foot. Not bad, really, though I’m honestly not sure how much I ate is actually digestible. I’ll let you know how that goes.

Along this same strain, while walking about last night, I found a long line of twenty or so Chinese behind a soft serve ice cream machine. I asked what they were queueing up for, and, praise be!, it was FREE. Apparently some local TV station needed footage of young people eating ice cream. Kind of funny though; they were taking special care to film a certain type of person (read: adorable Chinese toddler or foreigner) and the amount of ice cream you got depended on whether you were or weren’t that kind. So I got a lot of ice cream. They practically gave me a script, too. “Now, when we give you the ice cream, you say, ‘Oh YEAH! That’s GOOD!’” I did my best to deliver. They seemed satisfied. I hope this is the first step in my long career as the token foreigner on Chinese television.

2) The Nanjing Massacre Memorial. Not as fun as getting free ice cream by any means, but certainly worth the trip. This place is really fascinating. They have a standard walk-through museum with artifacts and pictures (all of which are heart-crushingly tragic), but they’ve also built a programatic walking path that takes this visitor through a dug-up mass grave, a meditation hall, an eternal prayer flame hall, and finally out into a new “Peace Park”. This park has a 100 meter-long reflection pool, at the end of which is a 20 meter-tall pedestral with an angel of peace holding a baby and a dove. At her feet are the enormous characters 和平, and below it, the translation: PEACE.

Anyone who goes to Nanjing really needs to see this place. Though deeply depressing, it tells an oft-forgetten chapter in world history. Over 300,000 innocent civilians lost their lives in one the most brutal acts of murder and rape mankind has ever borne witness to. It tells us an uncomfortable, no, horrifying truth we ought to remember; that humankind is capable of cruelty in the extreme, regardless of who they are or when they live.

3) To decompress after the Memorial, I went to a park by the biggest lake in Nanjing, and strolled through a bright, mustard-yellow Buddhist monastery up to a hill where I could look down onto the whole city on one side, and the lake and Ming-era city walls on the other. I learned at this point that the batteries I bought for my camera are total crap; they didn’t even have enough kick to turn the thing on. This has since been rectified, so expect pictures soon!

For those worrying about me traveling alone, know that I’ve found an independent but very safe system of travel. Buying train tickets and renting high-reputation rooms on the cheap all pose no issue anymore. I will continue to update this blog every few days and let you know what I’ve been up to.

Best wishes!