We started the day by moving to another hotel - the Motel168 where we just spent the night just had bad qi. After settling in a room at a Jinjiang hotel, we went to see the Nanjing Massacre Memorial. It commemorates the killing of 300,000 of the city’s people by the Japanese forces in 1937. The most horrifying room is an actual excavation that exposed skeletons of people tortured and murdered by the Japanese soldiers.
Interestingly enough, there’s a wing that is dedicated to Auschwitz. I suppose it’s good for us all to remember that terrible things happened, and are still happening, not just to us.
However, the circumstances didn’t seem to affect the behavior of any of the visitors. One guy crossed a memorial room that had a big sign that said “solemn silence” as he was yelling loudly into his phone, people were eating baked yams that they bought outside the memorial hall, right above the excavated skeletons, and people were blatantly taking pictures, with flash, despite the signs clearly asking to refrain. The ushers don’t seem to care much either. God, I hate people.The peak was when we sat down to rest for a bit. After a few minutes, I realized that a dude sitting next to me was taking pictures of us - he was holding his phone, and on the screen were Julia and me as seen through the front camera with the face recognition square things framing our faces. I wonder what he was thinking - “OMG! a white guy! in the massacre memorial! Nobody is ever going to believe me!” Anyway ,to retaliate, I pulled out my phone, stuck it in front of his face and took some pictures of him. It was dark, and he was very ordinary looking, so I’ll spare you guys.
From there we continued to the brocade museum which we passed by on the way, not knowing what “brocade” even is. Now I can tell you that it refers to loom-woven decorative fabrics, and for me, that meant more looms. I love looms. I would like to have more looms in my life. And less people. Love looms, hate people. That’s just the way I am.
From there we took the metro to the Nanjing University, where Julia’s dad got his degree in physics. We took a picture of Julia at the university gate to show her dad, walked around just a little bit, because it was already dark, and went to a bar that we saw on the way. It was still a little early, so we were the only patrons, and the stage that was fully equipped for a band was empty. The staff told us that there’s a show every night at 9:30pm, so we decided to leave after a few drinks and come back tomorrow for the show.
Next we had to find dinner. We went to a more central part of town, where we saw a food stand that sold deep fried crabs. They have been deep fried for so long that you just eat them with their shell.
To make things easy for us, Julia picks the food, unless I have a craving for something. This time she messed up and accidentally ordered three dishes of soup. I made two resolutions at that meal: first, we can cut down on our soup consumption from now until the end of the trip. Second, I really need to speed up my learning of Chinese.
No comments:
Post a Comment