We decided to leave for Shanghai that night, rather than the next morning, so we checked out of our hotel, left our bags in the luggage room and went out for a last day of adventures in Nanjing. We went to explore Zhongshan - a huge park at the eastern end of the city.
We took a metro and got to Nanjing’s outskirts where we got some breakfast and went to a quick walk inside a local market.
Between the long stands selling vegetables there were a couple that had live chickens in cages. The one next to it was the butcher’s stand. How convenient.
The most common form of transportation vehicle in China is electric bikes. The are quiet and fast, which is nice if you’re riding one, but terrible if you’re a pedestrian about to be hit by one. Common practices with an electric bike is yanking out the original pedals (if one looks closely, one can still see the axis rotating as the bike is running), and completely disregarding traffic laws and common sense. I’m telling you all this now because right before entering the park we came across this wonderful specimen:
Zhongshan consists of a chain of hills, and the easiest way to get up is to take a bus from the parking lot at the entrance. After being dropped off we had to walk a little to get to the stairway that leads to Dr. Sun Yat-sen’s Mausoleum.
At the top there’s a room with the big statue of the dude, but unfortunately the tomb itself is kept closed. Bummer.
From there we walked to the Ming Xiaoling Mausoleum, where the Hungwu Emperor, founder of the Ming dynasty, is buried. All Ming dynasty emperors built one of these for himself, and they are scattered all over China. However, some of them do come in clusters. Again, our attempts to see the actual grave were thwarted, as we were told by the guy at the gift shop that the the actual grave is closed for the season. We walked towards it anyway, and found ourselves wandering through a walled forest known as Lone Dragon Hill.
We walked along the entire wall and found ourselves back at the starting point. We still don’t know where the grave is. What does a guy need to do to see a Chinese ruler’s grave these days?!
We had to leave - we still had a train to Shanghai to catch. That did not stop us getting distracted by the ruins of another Mausoleum:
What we thought was the purple river but was probably just a small pond (these are sausages at the top left corner):
and a calligraphy garden:
We finally got to an actual road where we managed to get a taxi to take us to the hotel. Taxi drivers in China are very specific, and you can’t be wrong when you talk to them. Julia gave the address to the taxi driver and told him it’s in the southern part of the street, which resulted in this very typical conversation:
- “That’s not south at all!”
- “Well, it doesn’t matter, just take us to that address.”
- “You really should know your way around”
- “We’re not from here. We’ve been here for three days and we’re leaving tonight.”
- “Still, you shouldn’t say south if it’s not south!”
We picked up our stuff from the hotel’s luggage room and took the metro to the train station. The hardest part of getting train tickets is blocking people from cutting you in line. This is usually achieved by clever placement of a traveling bag right in front of the offender.
When we got to our room in Shanghai, we were already too tired to do anything, so we stayed in our rooms, ate a lot of cakes, and collapsed. Success.
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