Too Noisy in Nanjing

And thus I touched down in Nanjing. I collected my luggage and hopped on the bus into town. The plan after this was to take a taxi to my hostel and then meet up with my friend Kit who lived nearby. I got off the bus at the train station and saw lots of free taxis as well as the usual unlicensed lot trying to scam me.

So far so good.

Then followed a miserable 30 minutes as each taxi I approached refused to take me for various reasons. The first was that I was catching taxis in "the wrong place" so had to walk to the other side of the station. I walked over but any taxis I hailed refused to take me to where I wanted to go or just simply said they didn't know the road. Which was one of the largest ones in Nanjing. So how could a taxi driver not know it. And I was constantly being stared at and hassled.

So I burst into tears and sat down against a wall. After a while I pulled myself together but still stayed sat there as I had no idea what to do next and had lost interest in helping myself. My feminist independence vanished and this was where I felt like I needed a man to take charge and look after me:P After a while I attracted a fan base who peered at me. This annoyed me. "Are you Russian? Your hair is beautiful!" one said in Chinese. "No. British" I replied. "Oooo!". I hauled myself to my feet and tried again with a taxi and lo and behold I found one who actually seems to know the city they work in and he took me to the hostel. Nightmare.

And then I joined up with Kit and spent the next week having a great time eating and drinking and wandering around. I met two more graduates of Edinburgh's Chinese department, as well as from SOAS, and was heartened by how good they were at the lingo. I will get there eventually. We cycled to an island in the middle of the Yangtze River which involved getting a knackered ferry which was fun. We had a cycle around this island which was largely agricultural and visited an art gallery showcasing art by some mentally-ill people- which was unexpected to see in China! To get there a man with a motorcycle truck (basically a motorcycle with a truck on the back-common here) gave us a lift. This involved us and the bikes squeezing into the tiny space and hanging on as he whizzed along at 50mph and slalomed around other traffic. Yeah it was quite dangerous... I was basically standing up and I was terrified he'd tip the bike over but we got there safe and sound-for the price of a packet of cigarettes.

I also visited the Nanjing Massacre Memorial which commerates the slaughter of around 300,000 Chinese civilians by the Japanese army in the 2nd World War (Japan disputes this number) and the rape and maiming of thousands more. It was fairly horrific. However the memorial was not very good and the Chinese visitors acted like they normally do, taking pictures and larking about which I thought was disrespectful. Also I felt that all the bones on display should be laid to rest and not be a tourist attraction... And they overdid the "this is what Japan did but we are friends now look how friendly we are peace for ever Japan killed 300,000 but WE ARE FRIENDS AND WE DON'T HOLD IT AGAINST THEM but we do really".

Nanjing was also where I realised I am now used to Chinese food. I had such a lovely time stuffing my face with tasty things and chatting to my friends. We went to a restaurant specialising in cuisine like that in Qingdao so I could nom on my favourite dishes and we also had what was basically lamb shank but served with a glove. You put the glove on, pick up the bone and gnaw to your heart's content. Fantastic. Nanjing has a great cosmopolitan feel and had some lovely cafes and even a German bakery selling cheese and bread. Admittedly the air is bad but I began to see that China has potential for me to stay. Kit has a job writing for a bilingual magazine. He writes and translates Chinese articles. The pay works out at £500 a month with no tax which sounds tiny but in China is just enough to live ok. So now I have a seed of a plan of coming back to Shanghai and getting a similar job. There is an expat magazine in Qingdao that I will try to get work for which shouldn't be too hard as I heard a rumour they needed people.

Alternatively a lot of people here were on scholarships that paid accomodation and a tiny allowance so that might be another way to finance coming back...

Another major event in Nanjing was I went to my first KTV... KTV is endemic in Asia (except perhaps North Korea...) and is karaoke. We all piled into a room and drank lots of jinjiu, nasty Chinese alcohol-like cough medicine but so much worse, and sang along to Lady Gaga and Ricky Martin. Good times:) Then we went to a club but as it neared 6am the atmosphere deteriorated and some of the African immigrants started trying to fight and throwing snooker balls and grabbing bottles as weapons. Nothing snowballed into a real fight though. Then a McDonald's to finish the night :)

The only bad moment in Nanjing was when we visited a bookshop. I mentioned to a friend that the bilingual books were over here and then spent the next 5 minutes wandering around browsing. After a while a Chinese man came up and asked me to "turn my voice down". I was completely confused at first as I hadn't said anything for a while so thought he had got the wrong person. But no, my one sentence 5 minutes earlier had been too loud as people "were trying to read". I got really rather cross at the rudeness of all this as not only had I hardly said anything, and certainly nothing loud, the loudspeaker was constantly broadcasting loud announcements so it was hardly quiet in there and this was a bookshop not a library and I can talk if I want! And you're supposed to browse a book and then buy it, not sit there and read the whole thing... So my friends and I had an argument with him and the whole thing angered me. I dislike being accused of rudeness if my behaviour has been perfectly normal. Grrr.

But otherwise Nanjing was lovely and I stayed longer than I had intended. But Shanghai still beckoned so I booked a ticket on the bullet train...