Escaping the Rain

Tuesday, May 18, 2010--Tunxi to Nanjing   It rained all night with thunder being added in the morning.  It was definitely a good idea to plan to head northward rather than go southward and try to climb Huangshan.   We needed to be at the train station early, so I went downstairs to check out while Wes did final things in the hotel room.  They called upstairs to have the maid check the room to see that we had not taken anything.  The maid walked in on Wes sitting on the toilet!  She returned to the hall and waited for him to exit the room.   We took a taxi to the train station since it was raining and our time was short.  I knew that taxis are reasonable here in China; I had taken them a couple of times on previous trips.  It cost only a little more than a dollar to pay for the taxi for a trip that had taken us 70 minutes to walk when we went to buy our tickets.   The train trip took 7 hours.  People around us were curious about us and eventually became friendly with us.  Some spoke a little English.  Almost everyone in China is a fan of the NBA and wants to talk about basketball.  When I tell them I am from San Antonio they usually know immediately that it is the home of the Spurs.  One of the young men who talked to us at first was very excited and could name all the teams in Texas.  His favorite is the Houston Rockets because of Yao Ming playing for them.   One young man eventually moved to our seat and talked to us for the rest of the trip.  He spoke English well.  His mother is a doctor and his father is a teacher, so they greatly emphasized getting a good education.  He is a marketing manager for a Chinese firm that sells only inside China, and he travels for weeks at a time.  He was making a stop tonight in his hometown to have a short dinner with friends, then he was departing for a 36-hour train trip to western China.  But he was happy with his work and expressed plans to establish his own business someday.    When we decided to come to Nanjing two days earlier than planned, we also decided to get a hotel in a different part of town for those days than the one where we already held a reservation.  The hotel we chose was northward and not too far from the train station.  We had no problem finding it.  It is more basic (only 3 stars) than most of the places where we have stayed.  The main difference is that the room is a bit smaller.  It will be fine for 2 nights.   After settling into the room, we went out looking for a restaurant and settled on a place in the neighborhood.  They had photos of dishes on the wall, so we studied it.  Wes picked out a dish that looked like slices of beef with peppers in a sauce.  I picked out one that looked like mushrooms in a similar sauce with peppers.  When the dishes arrived, they looked like the photos, but they were not what we expected.  The "beef" dish probably was beef, but it was beef liver slices.  The "mushrooms" proved not be be vegetables at all but to be pieces of pigtail in a sauce.  We ate up anyway, but we were a bit disappointed.  Wes was ready to return to having instant noodles in the room after that.   Wednesday, May 19, 2010--Nanjing   For the first time since arriving in China we had no breakfast this morning.  Breakfasts are fairly common with rooms in most places, but Nanjing is a city in which none of the hotels at our reservations site were offering breakfasts with their rates.  That's fine, however, for there are many places to grab small, quick bites from street vendors.  We eventually stopped at one and had two steamed buns each--one flavored with green onions and the other one filled with chopped vegetables and tofu.   We walked for 6 hours exploring the area.  We wandered through Xuanwu Park which is between our hotel and the train station.  We found a compound which apparently houses officials of the Communist Party.  We explored a market near there with nice fruits, vegetables, meats, fish, etc.  We found a street lined for blocks with computer stores and went inside one and visited with a salesman who was interested to know what Wes had paid for his Acer netbook in the U.S. (the equivalent of 2100 yuan versus the 2500 yuan price in the store).  We located the hotel where we will go tomorrow when we check out of the present one.  We rested in a beautiful pocket park and watched people.  Etc.   Unfortunately, the computer won't work in the hotel where we are.  I diagnosed the problem:  the wall outlet where the broadband cable connects was defective.  The cable would not go far enough into it to click into place and make the connection.  I reported it to the front desk, but when we returned in the afternoon, it was the same except that a different cable was there that also would not click into the outlet.   In the evening, we went back out to the bus station we had seen north of where we were staying.  We bought tickets for the trip to our next destination for May 23 when we will depart here.    Thursday, May 20, 2010--Nanjing   While we were getting ready this morning to depart from our hotel, a repairman came to the room to fix the computer connection.  Just as I had diagnosed, he needed to change the wall outlet.  He had it repaired and working as we wheeled our bags out of the room to checkout.   Our new hotel is straight downt he street from the old one.  We could have taken the metro, but we worried about it being awkward with our luggage.  Instead we just walked it.  The Zhongshan is a much nicer place than where we were staying before.  It has 4 stars.  But it still suffers from a problem that seems to be rather common in Chinese hotels--dirty carpeting.  I don't know if they vacuum or not, but they definitely never shampoo the carpeting in hotels in this country.    Today was hot.  We went exploring to the southern part of the city.  We saw the Presidential Palace, the Fuxi Temple (Confucian), the new modern Nanjing Library, and the Zhonghua Gate.  Nothing was very spectacular.  I had always heard that Nanjing is a nice city.  And it is a pretty city with beautifully manicured and tree-lined boulevards.  But the sights seem to be limited so far.   Because of the heat, we stopped both at Carrefours and at Wal-mart while we were out walking to buy cold diet colas to refresh us.  For lunch, we stopped at a street vendor to have a snack that we have learned to like.  It consists of a thin, crispy pancake (like an Indian dosa has) that is spread with a beaten egg and two sauces (including a spicy one), topped with sesame seeds and chopped onion and green vegetables, and wrapped with thin pieces of crispy pork skin placed inside.  It is delicious and an easy snack to eat out of the hands while walking.   While out, Wes commented about his nose getting a workout on this trip.  Like most of Asia, China has bad smells in the air often--either from the unusual flavorings of its foods, from the products used at the construction sites which are everywhere, or from the fact that the sewage system is not top-of-the-line.  I've learned just to accept these bad odors, but I do sometimes lose my appetite because of them.    My biggest problem here in Nanjing has been the particles in the air.  I keep getting them in my eyes.  They can really irritate and can be very difficult to get out of the eye.