We were able to sleep in this morning and only got up at 8:30am. We are provided one morning of breakfast during our two mornings here and Marshall and I planned on using it this morning. Unfortunately the breakfast ended at 9:00am and we didn't know that. We hit the streets to find some food instead. There were many street vendors, and we found a shop that had fried egg with pepperoni on it, which you put into a crispy bread shell. The man put some spicy sauce on it too. It was a very interesting and tasty meal.
After breakfast we all headed to the tomb of Dr. Sun Yat-sen. His life's work was to unify China, and though he didn't succeed in his lifetime, he is honored both by communists and nationalists for his efforts. The grounds, which are really a national park, are expansive and include his mausoleum, a museum, several scenic areas including a Ming dynasty tomb site and plenty of shops. All around are rolling hills filled with trees and mountains too. It reminded me of Tennessee in the Great Smoky Mountains quite a bit: both the smoky look and the similar topography. The mausoleum is quite the monument. The path to it slopes upwards the whole way until you arrive at the stairs. There are three different structures with similar blue roofs on the way up, punctuated by flights of stairs. Then finally there is a massive set of stairs, which some of the guys raced up, which leads to the mausoleum site and rear gardens. There is a large statue of the doctor and behind it in a circular room with a high ceiling, no pictures allowed, is the actual tomb/box/sarcophagus. We headed down the many flights of stairs to go to the museum. Our allotted time to see the whole complex was two hours, which wasn't nearly enough. We saw plenty though still. On the way to the bottom, Kurt and I were stopped by a young lady for a picture (this time I actually got a picture on my camera as well).
Moments after that though, my favorite part of the trip came. A little boy was descending the steps with his parents and when they walked in front of the bench we were on, his mother encouraged him to say the A, B, C's for us. He counted to ten (kind of) a few times and sang the A, B, C song for us. He might have been the cutest little kid I have seen so far. There are quite a number of them though, in China. I was able to quickly turn on my camera when he started, so I have video of the whole thing, in HD! That excited me most. It would be prohibitive to post the video on the blog, but I'll probably put it on YouTube when I get back in the States and link to it from the blog (as well as the other videos I've taken). The boy had on a shirt that said something to the effect of, "The giraffe openned[sic] the forest to the party!" He and his parents were pretty cool (the mum spoke English pretty well).
When we had completed our descent to the main level, we hopped aboard a choo-choo train like shuttle to go to the museum. However, the train took us to the entrance of the park then left us. Amanda, Tim and Kurt took a car-ride with some guy that was at the bottom (taxi maybe?) to get to the museum, but since we only had 30 minutes left the rest of us decided to wait for another shuttle that would take us to the top. We waited for the group to assemble, and then headed back to the hotel in the bus. I forgot to mention earlier, but we're staying in a traditional Chinese inn. It's a very interesting place with larger halls and corridors indoors. Though it's not open to the outside in most places, there are enough openings to make the inside part (except for the rooms) quite chilly because it's not heated.
Back at the hotel, a group of us assembled to find some lunch and visit a Confucian temple/teaching site nearby. Yang, Nana, Luke, Brennan, Sarah, Will, Anna, Julie and I found a restaurant that served a dumpling with pork inside. Most of the rest of the group had eaten it before on the trip, but it was new to me, and like most foods it tasted very good. We also had some tofu and ham strips. Don't think tofu slabs, but more like spaghetti tofu. Not bad at all. After our lunch we hit the Confucian temple.
The temple required ¥30 to get in, but it was worth it. In the past it had been a center of Confucian study and place of worship. While we were there, a woman was even praying in one of the main buildings. There were two traditionally styled buildings in the complex with large amounts of jade art and pictures made in jade. The architecture in places like this, and the Forbidden City, is always very beautiful and I can't get enough of it. It's all very intricate and ornate.
There was an elementary school right next door, so we watched them for a bit having recess. Basketball is pretty popular there and there were a number of kids playing it.
We walked around the city for a while after that. Luke and I had gotten separated from Brennan and Yang, so we just kind of wandered. There was a food market nearby, so we went to check that out. It was quite the place, full of every kind of food and things that shouldn't be eaten. There were pig snouts and tails, whole ducks with respective parts, nuts and candies of all kinds. Strangely, there were many infomercial-like booths around. It was like a trade-fair with mops and dusters being shown along-side window washing kits and massive chunks of unidentifiable meat. After our market foray we headed back to the hotel for some journaling, reading and writing before dinner.
Guests joined us for dinner tonight. Professor Si's younger brother, his wife and their two year-old son ate with the engineers and predominately women's tables, respectively. The third table was staffed by Professor VanDrunen and consisted of mostly the other guys in the group. As an engineering student I sat with Mr. Si, along with the other engineering students, Prof. Jen and Yang for translation. He spoke some English, and I'm sure his writing and reading are excellent, but largely we needed Yang to translate. At some points our discussion became a little too technical for Yang's Chinese (though he's native there are words he doesn't know, just like in English there are words we don't know), but he did a fine job overall. Mr. Si is our Professor Si's younger brother; he is a mechanical/electrical engineer, working for ZTE a telecom company in China (we will visit them tomorrow). He has a master's degree and did his thesis on the mechanics of robotics (that was the general translation). It was a nice dinner and despite the language barrier we were able to ask some pretty decent questions. Yang even learned a bit about 3 and 4G networks (third and fourth generation wireless networks) in China.
After dinner there was a playful chicken fight on the sidewalk between Tim and Julie, and Kurt and Marshall. A bunch of Chinese people gathered around to watch, it was quite funny. Before that Julie (the smallest) carried Tim (the largest) on her back; it was pretty impressive. Then some of us called a taxi and headed to a part of the old city wall. We went to a part that the Japanese had fought to take when they massacred and raped the city in the years before WWII. Though we arrived a bit late, the people in the gatehouse agreed to let us in for an extended period of time at reduced cost. It was dark, but there was still plenty to see, and photos to take. We explored a bit in the dark and took plenty of pictures. Part of the way through, I realized that the manual setting I had been using for longer exposures was still set to manual focus from earlier when Cedric was using it. I don't think it affected many pictures, and I changed it to autofocus right away, so the rest of them were a bit sharper. We called another taxi to take us back to the hotel after taking a few pictures by the river.
There was an internet café nearby that someone wanted to use, so we dropped them off before going inside the hotel to play Rook then go to bed. Again, astonishingly, I did very poorly at it. Amanda was my partner and we won only one round. We only played five rounds then separated to get our stuff packed in order to be ready for checkout in the morning. That's pretty much all she wrote. Tomorrow brings a company meeting (ZTE) and then a train to Hangzhou, where we will stay until Monday. I think we will have free internet access there, so there might be quite a few blog posts where there had been none for a few days. Sorry about that.
Good night from Nanjing.
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