July 7th

As my journal says, happy date! The date was the cool numbers 7-7-07. The start of the first weekend. Right after breakfast we all piled into four buses and headed out. We were organized on the buses by having 2 or 3 RA groups assigned to one bus. These bus assignments stayed the same for all of both weekends. My RA group and Danny and James’ RA group were assigned to Bus 1. On the bus Danny and I were having fun looking at and talking about all the different types of vehicles we were seeing. We both thought that the little tiny vans that are all over the place in Nanjing were pretty cool looking.

The first stop of the day was Sun Yat-Sen’s mausoleum and the tomb of the first emperor of the Ming Dynasty, both located in the Purple Mountain, or Zhongshan, Recreation Area about 30 minutes drive outside of the city. We went to the mausoleum first. It’s near the top of the mountain, so there are a lot of stairs of to the top where the mausoleum itself is at the top; 392 as a matter of fact. But unlike other staircases I came across during my trip these were all equally spaced, easy to climb steps. They were just the right height that going one or two at a time felt comfortable. Leading up to all the stairs is a long walkway, almost a roadway, with lots of trees on either side. It’s really nice to walk along in almost foggy conditions with all the trees on either side. The actual mausoleum is a fairly small, extremely stuffy room that is usually filled with lots of people. It’s extremely stuffy because the humidity was about 100%, and the entire thing is built of stone with the only ventilation being the single door that is barely wide enough for two people to go through at once. Needless to say nobody stay inside the mausoleum for very long. Inside the mausoleum there were pretty mosaics on the ceiling/walls (it’s a domed ceiling). The mosaics were these big blue with white stars and dark red tiles on the sides, with all the tiles being pretty small – it looked like they might have been about 1 sq cm each, but they were high enough up that it was hard to tell their size.

After we had all seen the mausoleum, and climbed back down to where the buses were, we headed off to the tomb of the first emperor of the Ming dynasty. That was in a nearby part of Purple Mountain, although not quite close enough that we could all walk to it. There was a pathway, though not one with a bunch of stairs, that lead up to where the “tomb” is. It’s not really a tomb because when the emperor was buried he had people take four coffins in each direction to try to thwart grave robbers. What ended up happening is that nobody really knows where he is buried, but where the buildings are is called his tomb.

At the bottom of the walkway up to the buildings there was another walkway that led of perpendicular to the one up to the buildings. This walkway was small enough that it really was only for foot travel. Along it every 100 ft or so there would be a pair of large, stone statues, one on either side of the path. The statues were of officials, generals, camels, unicorns, elephants, xiezhi (mythical creature), horses, and lions. For each creature there were two pairs of statues. Of the officials and generals there were just two pairs of standing statues, but of the animals one pair was standing and the other pair was sitting. The two creatures that caught my attention were the camels and the unicorns. The camels I liked because they look very similar to some stone camel statues in the Seattle Art Museum. The unicorns I found surprising because they look nothing like the classic unicorn in western stories. Chinese unicorns, according to the sign, are a mix of tiger, lion, ox, and dragon. The xiezhi is pretty similar to the unicorn – its sign said that a xiezhi is a bear-eyed unicorn.

This walkway has trees between each of the statues. I had noticed them, but then suddenly at one point I really focused on them. They were all gingkoes! I found that so cool that this really long walkway had hundreds of full grown ginkgoes along it. Another thing I was noticing as we were walking along the walkway was this very loud buzzing, insect noise. I found out later that they were crickets. They are everywhere in Nanjing. When I first heard them they sounded to me like a very loud version of the sound that the really huge power lines make when it’s damp outside.

When we got to the end of the walkway we met the buses, and headed to a nice hotel for lunch. There was a really huge fish tank, with really big fish right in the lobby of the hotel.

After lunch we headed to the Provincial Museum. During the Nationalist time period this museum was the National Museum. It was a very nice, but fairly all encompassing museum. It had rooms in it of pottery, jade, silk, pieces of jewelry, and other various artifacts. In one of the rooms of pottery there was this amazing vase that was decorated completely with character. The guide said it had over 10,000 characters hand painted on it. Some other pieces in the museum that I enjoyed were a small statue of a rhinoceros that until I didn’t realize was a rhinoceros until I saw its little sign, a set of pots all shaped like pigs, and a plate with the hear-no-evil-see-no-evil-speak-no-evil monkeys on it. I also really enjoyed the room of all the silk. They had a working silk loom in there! It was really big; about 20 ft long, and 10-12 ft high at its tallest point. Along the walls there were pieces of silk that were all really pretty bright colors and patterns. They even had a silk jacket on display that was made of pieces of silk almost like a patchwork quilt. It was really pretty.

When we left the museum and got back on the buses to head back to HNC that afternoon it was just starting to rain. As we drove back the rain fell heavier and heavier very quickly, so that at one point it was raining so heavily on the bus windows that it looked like we were driving through a car wash. The windows were completely covered in sheets of water. It was really eye opening to look out the windows at the streets, and see them flooding within 30 minutes of the rain starting, and to realize this is what is meant by monsoon. The street was starting to flood, so that in the bike/moped lanes on either side of the street there was about 6 inches of water. The sewers couldn’t take any more water in, so the water was forming currents, waves, and whirlpools like some large shallow impromptu river.

When we got back to HNC I found that I got a lovely view of the lightening looking out my dorm room window, so I sat up there and watched the rain, and watched and counted the lightening and thunder. The lightening for quite awhile was 5-10 miles away, which meant that I could see it and hear it really well. There was one strike that’s thunder came so quickly I think it was almost on top of us. That was really cool.

July 8th

We were supposed to go to the bazaar and a bunch of other places this Sunday. However the monsoon rain of the previous afternoon had continued. It turns out that the rain was the heaviest rain Nanjing had had in a decade. This meant that we were delayed about an hour in starting out in hopes that the rain might lessen or stop, but when it showed no signs of changing we headed out to the bazaar. The bazaar is comprised of all sorts of streets and alleys squished together and filled with shops, but it’s pretty interesting to see the stuff they sell there.

When we arrived at the bazaar it was just beginning to flood in some areas; especially at the Imperial Examination Hall, which is where we went first. Between the few small buildings that comprised the hall there was about 4 inches of “standing” water. I decided that I was going to get soaked no matter how much I tried not to, and my shoes were already pretty wet from walking down the street, so I just waded through the 4 inches to go see the examination hall. I did get soaked everywhere by the end of that day. It was pretty cool getting to see an Imperial Examination Hall in person because I had done a report on the imperial examinations last spring for history class. The testing rooms are little tiny box like rooms that the candidates taking the exam couldn’t leave for the whole duration of the exam, which could be a few days. They had models of candidates in the cells so that you could see how cramped it was in there.

After we finished seeing the examination hall I wandered around the bazaar with a few of my friends for awhile, but it was so wet out that it wasn’t all that much fun. I was wearing my hat and my rain jacket with its hood up, and between the hat and the hood my line of vision was greatly reduced. After wandering around the entire camp had lunch at a hotel that was right next door to the bazaar. After we finished lunch most people went back out to the bazaar, but I decided I had had enough of the weather and the bazaar (I had no interest in shopping like most people did) so I stayed with some of the camp staff members who were still finishing their lunch at the hotel. Megan also stayed because she wasn’t feeling very well.

When we finally got back in the buses to go back to HNC it was early afternoon, around 2pm. For some reason that nobody seems to really know we took the very long route back to HNC. That means that because of some combination of detours, wrong turns, and the wish to show us the city we drove all around the outside of the city to get back to the center. It was a slightly annoying to go back the long way just because everyone was really damp (and because of this slightly uncomfortable), but it was really cool to see a lot more of the city. We even saw a glimpse of the Yangtze River at one point. At that point of the river it looked to be not quite as wide as the Columbia River is at Maryhill, but still plenty big. And there is still a ways before the river gets to its delta, with rivers coming into it all along the way.

We saw a lot of things along the drive around the city. We especially saw a lot of buildings of all sizes, types, and levels of repair. One different thing we saw was a truck that’s back was filled up with ducks and chickens, all being kept inside by a net over the top. Another thing I saw was a large clump of buildings that it turns out is the Nanjing Cigarette Factory – that is one huge factory campus. One building that particularly caught my attention was a pair of apartment buildings right next to each other that had a little sky bridge connecting them about ten stories from the top. That bridge must be very handy if you need to go between the tops of the buildings, because they were pretty tall towers. One thing I noticed when we were out driving about throughout my whole time in Nanjing was that there is a lot more advertising all over the places. All those people in America who complain that America is being covered by advertising should see Nanjing; they might complain a lot less.

When we got back to HNC the first thing that was on everybody’s mind’s was drying off, and getting into clean, dry clothes. This being finally accomplished, we had a few hours of free time before dinner. Then after dinner we finished up the weekend with a nice two hours of study hall.