The Jasmine Hostel
The Jasmine had a lot more character than I was expecting and it made our stay a pleasant one. The people were nice and helpful making it easy to communicate our needs with them, even if our Chinese was less than up to par. Plus, the hostel was right next to all the our friends in the city making our stay a convenient and blessed one, especially if we had any needs and/or questions about the city. I pretty much have to say that both the Merwin's and and the Cheely's were an incredible blessing with helping us and feeding us during our time in Nanjing.
I should also note that they had a Foosball table, which reminded me so much of when I was younger when my dad and I use to play for hours on end. I haven't completely lost my touch either as I soundly defeated most I played against (the exception was 2 against 1 [me]) Actually, it has been one of my dreams to enter one of the regional contests in the States with my dad to see how far we could get.
1st Day
Our first day was spent just relaxing as Shannon was recovering from being sick in Xiamen. Unfortunately, Shannon was sick for most of our trip making it difficult for her to do too much as she struggled with headaches, nauseousness, and stomach pain. Nonetheless, we spent our first day in true American style drinking coffee and eating pizza for dinner. I must confess that after 4 months of not seeing a Starbucks - or any other form of decent coffee store- that the Starbucks in Nanjing looked like an oasis in a desert. We spent a good portion of our first day just sitting in the Starbucks reading and relaxing. Albeit, we managed to find the one Starbucks in Nanjing to sit down and read in that made us feel like we were on showcase for all the Chinese of Nanjing to see. There is nothing like sitting down to read and glancing up to see people walking by pointing and staring at you. Of course, I usually just ignore such looks and/or comments in Chinese about foreigners, but it was difficult not to feel as if you were on display for the whole world to see. Being me, I relocated to a nice corner away from the huge glass windows acting as our display case.
Papa Johns was a nice find considering that most of the time all you see is Pizza Hut and McDonald's - two places I try never to go to even in the States. Jonathan was especially a big a fan and I thought it would be kind of cool to go to Papa Johns in China since I didn't even know that they had them here. The peculiar thing about pizza places in China is that they are the fanciest and almost nicest places around to go to. One wouldn't normally think that going out to Pizza Hut or Papa Johns would be really a big deal, but it's like walking into Olive Garden back home. Good news though, they provide free delivery and deliver it to via electric bike. I have to say that they are severely undercutting the costs of delivery drivers back home. I mean who would have thought delivery came via bikes anymore? By the way, you can have KFC delivered in the same fashion.Presidential Palace & Fuzi Miao
After talking with our friend Andy on the second day, we set out to see the presidential palace where Sun Yatsen, Chiang Kaishek, and other important 20th century Chinese figures frequented from 1912-1948. The layout of the presidential palace is a rather impressive one as you can see from the picture to the left. Unfortunately, though, a model representation of the palace is about as good as you are going to get. We spent about 3 hours walking around looking and reading everything that was in English.In that 3 hours of walking I quickly came to two conclusions that I will recommend to anybody else who thinks about visiting this historical city: (1) Don't go in the winter. Go in late Spring or early Summer so you aren't freezing to death. (2) 20 degree without any form of indoor heating is a killer if you are outside for long periods of time and not wearing lots of layers. In addition, if you are considering seeing Purple Mountain you should definitely make sure to wait until the weather is nice and clear so that you can have decent walking weather in which you will be out for hours. As you can probably tell, we didn't go to Purple Mountain as it was cloudy and seemingly colder each day we stayed. Finally, I should note that whenever traveling in China make sure to have the characters with you if you can't properly pronounce the pinyin or you could end up looking like this (forgive me Jonathan):
The picture above of us trying to figure out where the Confucius temple was; it actually eluded us for a day or so. Unfortunately, all our searching wasn't even worth it as it was possibly the worst historical place I visited while in Nanjing. Fuzi Miao is simply a huge tourist trap with the only redeeming values coming from the river and the architecture that surround it.
Zhonghuamen 中华门 (Nanjing City Gate)
In contrast, I would actually recommend going to visit Zhonghuamen as it is one of the most unique city gates that I have ever seen (Not that I am an expert in city gates or have seen many). The city wall that surrounds Nanjing city is - the Chinese claim - the largest in the world. It completely encircles most of Nanjing and has a river to act as a moat just outside its city walls. It also has some pretty cool sights and an okay little video that gives you an idea to how the huge gate was used if the city was under attack.
The rest of our trip was rather uneventful, which was a blessing since we had run into a few difficulties. I am sure I could include a few more paragraphs of monotonous details, but I don't want to bore you.
