Zhouzhuang & Nanjing

I realized I never wrote about last weekend's academic travel to Zhouzhuang and Nanjing. My bad.

We left Friday afternoon around 3:00 to head to Zhouzhuang. Zhouzhuang is one of the most famous water townships in China. There are 14 stone bridges throughout the town, and some of the bridges are famous and are the symbols of Zhouzhuang. On the bus ride there, I read some of an English book which was a nice break from Chinese, and talked some to others. I was pretty tired so it was nice to rest for a little while. Our tour guide rode on the bus with us, so he narrated some about the city we were going to, etc. I could understand some of what he was saying, but then it got to be too much of me not understanding so I kind of just tuned him out. We got checked into our hotel rooms and then had dinner in the hotel as a group. Most of the girls' Chinese roommates accompanied us on the trip (but mine didn't), so we had a huge group. After dinner we toured the well-preserved ancient residential houses. Zhouzhuang is a pretty small town and the streets are narrow along all of the waterways, but then these houses keep going on and on! It was hard to tell where one house ended and another started, but all of them seemed to have many rooms filled with lots of furniture. I kind of made up my own stories about the houses because I couldn't understand what our tour guide was saying. After we explored all of the houses we split up and took boat tours. The lady that was poling (is that a word?) our boat along sang some songs for us in the local dialect which was pretty cool. After we rode up and down several waterways we had free time to do whatever wanted.

The town was really small and was basically a bunch of shops selling the same stuff. I discovered a freezer of Magnums and had my first one in over a year...it was delicious. I introduced my friends and they were all fans. We walked up and down the streets and then some of us went into a small grocery store for some reason. It ended up being really fun because we were reading all of the English labels on stuff and we were laughing so hard. We heard some music so we went to discover the source and found this concert-type thing. Of course we didn't have tickets to get into the park/square, but when six American girls walk up to the guard, he didn't care and just let us in. There were all these weird blow up animal shapes, so we stopped to take pictures with them first, so the concert/show thing was over when we went to check it out. Then we went back to the hotel and a few of us played cards. We played some game I think it was called Palace that I had never placed before, but I won each time so I really like the game now!

The next morning we had breakfast and then got back on the bus to head to Nanjing. Nanjing was the capital of China in 1368 and then again for the Taiping Kingdom and then again under the KMT. It took about three or four hours to get there, which was kind of a long morning. I listened to some worship music which was really great and for a lot of the time just looked out the window. It was good to just spend some time being quiet. Once we got to Nanjing we went to this huge famous restaurant and had lunch. I wasn't a big fan of the food so it was a good thing I had eaten a granola bar in the bus. After lunch we headed to the hotel and we were all excited that the beds were comfy.

We left the hotel 10 minutes later to head to the Presidential Palace. 600 years ago it was the mansion of the Prince of Han in the Ming Dynasty and again of someone else in the Qing Dynasty. In 1853 the Taiping Rebellion conquered Nanjing and established their regime known as "The Kingdom of Heavenly Peace", and the palace was enlarged, but then a Qing military commander defeated the Taiping army. In 1912 Sun Yat-sen was elected the Provincial President of the Republic and changed the west garden of the palace into the Presidential Palace. Then in 1928 the palace became the admin office of the republic government. The Palace is now the China Modern History Museum. There were many rooms filled with furniture and pictures and paintings, but it got too overwhelming to read all of them. Outside there were some nice gardens and rocks to look at, but it was pretty hot. We wandered around there for a while and then headed to the Nanjing Massacre Museum.

In 1937 the Japanese invaded Nanjing and carried out mass executions and also did research on humans. The total death toll isn't exact, but they think it's between 200,000 and 350,000. The Memorial Hall was built in 1985 to remember those lost. There was a lot of empty space with walkways and little stones, and then this huge wall with the estimated number of victims. Then there was another massive wall with name after name of those killed in the six to eight weeks of Japanese occupation. There was also a big room where they had excavated many skeletons and displayed them, describing how each person had been tortured and then killed. It really hit me that many of those people's souls were probably in hell. It's hard to think about.

Saturday night they gave us free time, so a bunch of us girls found an Italian restaurant and ate dinner. Then we walked to a Dairy Queen for blizzards (yes, we were majorly craving Western food). Afterwards we went to this really crowded mall kind of place. It was a bunch of really small shops selling clothes, jewelry, etc. The ceilings were really low and it was super crowded and kind of dark...it looked pretty sketch but I guess it's legit. I bought a pair of earrings but that's all. My headache was pretty bad, I think from all of the heat that day, so I wasn't much in the mood to barter a lot and shop a lot. We decided to head back to the hotel, so we were walking to get a cab and a couple of Nigerian guys came up to us and started talking. They suggested several times that we hang out with them, but we told them we were done for the night and going back to rest. Then they called their friends and two more of them came over and they all kept saying no we all need to go hang out, oh your names are beautiful, it's only 9:00 we need to hang out together (it was 10:15). We started getting a little nervous because they were being so pushy and there were four big Nigerian guys that definitely could have taken us four American girls. Then they wanted our phone numbers and wanted to come visit us in Suzhou. Finally I said I felt sick and we really needed to go and we got out of it. It made us glad that we had stayed in a group for the night.

Sunday morning we got back on the bus and headed to Sun Yat Sen's Mausoleum and the tomb of the first Ming dynasty emperor. To get up to Sun Yat Sen's mausoleum we had to climb 392 steps. It was so incredibly hot and humid outside we were sweating before we even gave the people our tickets to get into the place. We had a lot of time at the place and all you really do is climb up and look at it, but I guess it was cool. One famous thing there is the gate inscribed with four Chinese characters that Sun Yat-sen wrote "Tian Xia Wei Gong" which manes "What is under heaven is for all." The tomb of the Emperor of the Ming Dynasty I never really got. We walked through a lot of doors and on paths and all around this place but I'm unsure of where the actual tomb is. This one building looked like it was the jackpot but once we got inside it was completely empty except for one construction worker who was taking a snooze in the corner.

After another stop for Magnum bars we climbed back on the bus and went to lunch. The food wasn't that good again, so we decided the Magnums were a good choice. On the way back to Suzhou most of us slept, I think. Traveling in China is pretty tiring, especially in the heat. I also finished my book and studied some. It was a good weekend of exposure to Chinese history, but it was also just really scheduled and busy.

I'm having a hard time loading pictures on my blog, but all of them are here