Tomb Sweeping

Mid-March was the tomb sweeping holiday, otherwise known as QingMing. To teh Chinese it means going back to their ancestors' graves and and clearing them off. To foreigners, it means three days off of work. Myself and two friends decided to go to HuangShan, or Yellow Mountain (in fact, a range of mountains). Unfortunately, we dropped the ball on buying train tickets which guarantees disaster whenever trying to travel when the rest of the country is also trying to travel. [The traveling done by the Chinese population during Chinese New Year is the largest human migration on Earth.] So we tried throwing out any city name we could think of in China to the booking agent, but he kept replying 没有 'méiyǒu, méiyǒu!' meaning WE DON'T HAVE ANY! What he did have were trains to Beijing which he kindly suggested but all of us have already been there. We finally settled on Nanjing, the former capital of the PRC.

On Thursday morning we took a leisurely 1 hour fast train to Nanjing. The nice weather helped, but Nanjing is itself a very pretty city. It isn't so built up (though still huge!) and there were trees lining the streets, wide promenades, and many parks to choose from. The first evening, we went to a Confucius Temple, tried out some street food snacks, and ran into a free lantern festival. We discovered quickly that no one in Nanjing could understand our Chinese. I don't know if we had Shanghai accents or they just weren't used to foreigners trying to speak Chinese, but communication proved difficult throughout the entire trip.

The next day we first went to Purple Mountain (Zijin Shan) where there is a mausoleum for the founder of the PRC, Sun Yat-Sen. There wasn't much hiking to be had and plenty of people on the steps up the mausoleum, but it was still an enjoyable time outdoors. Later, we went to the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall, a museum dedicated to the Nanjing Massacre. Also known as the Rape of Nanjing, it was a mass murder (300,000) and war rape that occurred during the six-week period following the Japanese capture of the city on December 13, 1937 during the Second Sino-Japanese War. Heavy, but the museum was very well done and informative, if not just a little bit biased.

The next day, our last day, we went out of the city to a hot springs resort. Surrounded by forest, we sat in hot springs infused with bags of coffee, red wine, green tea, herbs, flowers, coconut, and even fish! We sipped tea, read our books, and refreshed ourselves. That night we headed back into the bustle of Shanghai.