Day 58: Nanjing!

Friday morning, and I’m taking a vacation day. We were out the door at 7:45AM, and walked down to McDonalds to grab some breakfast. We had an 8:52 train leaving from the Shanghai railway station which is about 7 stops north on the line 1. It took a little longer than hoped to grab egg McMuffins and OJ, and then it took longer than we thought to grab a taxi. And then it took longer than planned to get across town. We were sitting in traffic at 8:30, and I was thinking, we’ll never make it on the train. It was bumper to bumper, and we weren’t going anywhere. I was trying to figure out what we were going to do if we missed the train.

Amazingly, we did make it, by about 2 minutes. Some folks who were camped out in our seats weren’t too happy that we showed up, but tough luck for them I guess. If you want the guaranteed soft seats, you’ve got to pay the 70RMB ($9) each way…

This is a high speed train. Not MagLev 271MPH fast, but 130 MPH fast. The train made about 3 stops, and right around 11AM, we were in Nanjing.

There was a very efficient taxi queue, and then we were across town to the hotel: the Crown Plaza. I had the address in English, so that wasn’t going to be helpful because I don’t know how to pronounce these street names yet. At the Shanghai airport, they have someone who will tell your taxi driver in Chinese where you’d like to go. But not here at the Nanjing train station. I was prepared for this, as I’d put the telephone number for the hotel into my cell phone, and I dialed the number and handed the phone to the driver. The first driver then told the 2nd taxi driver where to go.

For some reason, the taxi says 20, and you pay 21. Not sure why, but every taxi we got into had this 1RMB surcharge over the meter price. At least it was consistent.

I’d booked 2 king suite rooms with a roll away bed in each for 1200 RMB each ($150). The hotel was very nice, and the people were excellent at trying to accommodate our very large family. Unfortunately, they did not have any adjoining rooms, but they did get them nearby on the same floor. The room was very large for a hotel, and had no problem accommodating the rollaway bed. Our rooms ended up on the 49th floor, and the view (on a clear day) would’ve been spectacular. Today was a little cloudy (it had been raining), so it was not quite as good. The Crown Plaza appears to be the tallest building in the city, but there were 6 cranes nearby that we could see just in the one direction out the window, and a couple of them looked like they were getting close to the 51 stories of our hotel.

We walked around the area a bit once we’d dropped our bags off. It was after noon, and the kids were hungry. Garrison spotted a pizza hut, so we stopped in. Not quite what I had in mind, but hey, it was fine, and the kids were satisfied. Ah yes, Interesting and exotica Pizzas!

Next stop was the Nanjing city wall museum. Nanjing was the capitol for 6 or 10 dynasties. don’t ask me why they say 6 or 10, I guess it’s the way you count. This city was a fortress. Seriously. Completely surrounded with Great Wall sized Walls. But the taxi driver was not familiar with this location, so he took us to the Nanjing museum. Which was nice, and we got to see some cool stuff, but not what we were looking for. The burial suit of jade was very impressive.

 

 We walked outside the museum, and right into the rain. It was mid 80′s, so it felt good. There as a very nice little park, with a statue of Michelangelo, believe it or not.

Typical Nanjing City streets. Not as much English as Shanghai, but beautiful old tree lined streets.

We did find part of the city wall near hear, which we walked up to and along, and we thought we were at the correct location for the city wall museum, but it turns out that we were in the southeast part of the city, not the north central area at Xuanwu Lake, so the lake we thought we were looking at was the wrong lake. It didn’t look right,  because I was looking for some islands.

This is the top of the wall. Yeah, it’s huge.

We came back down and started walking to find a major cross street in this part of town to get our bearings and ran into one of the old gates to the city.

 

Eventually, we figured out that we were in the wrong part of the city, and got a taxi to the correct part of town. Getting into the museum was 40RMB for anyone over 1.3M.

The signs in English and Chinese… well, they still need some help from a native language speaker. It is amazing that they spend the money on carving these stones with a poor translation. Then again, it does give me no end to the amusement… The is a view from the south side (inside) of the wall.

View from the top of the wall. I found the islands I was looking for in the middle of the lake, so we are definitely at the right spot this time.

The size of the wall is amazing. this part stretches over a mile to the west.

 

 

 

Adjacent to the City Wall in this area is the beautiful JiMing temple. We decided we had other things to see, so did not venture in.

 

Nanjing had a very different feel to it. There are very few western faces here; you could go an hour walking here and only see Chinese people. So we were much more of a curiosity than in Shanghai. Despite this, we were overwhelmed, again and again, with the kindness of people. To get to the City Wall museum, someone saw we were having trouble, and just stopped, got off of their bicycle, listened to understand where we wanted to go, then flagged down a couple taxis and told the drivers where to take us. After we left the museum, the kids played at a park across the street. And at this park, we talked to a woman who’s son is in Atlanta, and she recommended taking the 304 bus to get to the Confucius Temple (our next stop). Having seen the busses in Shanghai, we declined, and we headed off on a walk down the hill. We were going to flag down a couple taxis, when again, a lady stopped, got off her bike, and asked how she could help. She was an English teacher. She helped us locate a bus stop and the right bus, told the bus driver where we were headed, told us that it was 8 stops to get there, and explained that we needed to pay for adults and the little ones were free, and that it would be 1 or 2 RMB depending on whether we got an air conditioned bus or not. Wow, it was awesome to be helped so much. It turns out that the bus system in Nanjing is much nicer than the one in Shanghai, and for good reason. Nanjing has only one subway line.

This was our very first bus ride in China. The extra 1 RMB for the AC was soooo worth it! It took us some time to find the temple once we got to our stop, but we asked several people as we got closer by pointing at the Chinese name on the map, and they would point out the right direction. Oh yeah, the Nanjing tourist map was 5 RMB; quite a bargain.

Eventually we made it to the area around the Confucius Temple, but we had a slight problem. We were running out of cash. And ATM machines here were not as common as in Shanghai. And when you did find one, it may not work with your overseas card. So I left the family to rest for a bit, and find some cash. It took me 30 minutes and 3 ATMs, but I did find one.

 

There was a big market in the area around the temple, so we bought a few trinkets for the kids, and decided we wanted to take one of these gondola rides.

It cost us $35 for the family to take a ride, but we found out that we’d purchased seats on a power boat for a narrated cruise. Unfortunately, it was in Chinese, so we didn’t understand a word. But there were lots of flashy lights to see, and it was nice to rest for a while.

At this point, everyone was starving and tired. We’d gotten up at 6:30 AM to make that 8:50 train, and with all the walking we’d done at both city wall locations, and around the market at the Confucius temple, and near the hotel, and it was now past 9:30… So we never went in the temple, but we did have a nice time in the area.

so, we wandered into the nearest restaurant, which was, unfortunately, a McDonalds. I was hoping for something a little more Chinese, but, hey, the kids were happy. After the food, we caught two taxis back to the hotel and we crashed for the night. By midnight everyone was asleep.