Day 21 - October 25th

Just couldn’t get the day started! The amounts of times we left the hostel and had to go back for things or got distracted by things! We head to Nanjing Museum, first taking the metro system. We sit and admire some of the warning signs. A toddler sitting across from us stands up and walks towards me so I give him a nice smile. He gets embarrassed and turns to run away to his mother, grabbing the first part of her body he could. Turns out it wasn’t his mother he turns to, but he accidentally grabs hold of a random guys legs he was next too! Cute Chinese baby!

I get distracted by a book store we walk by and I decide to go in to solve my lack of reading material problem! I am browsing the English section as Tom has to use the facilities, when a Chinese girl comes up to me and starts talking. I’m not sure what she is talking about, but she shows me a flyer for an English School. I stop her mid-sentence and in perfect English say “I can speak English!” She is highly embarrassed and runs away! Funny girl! Was pretty fit too! I end up buying The Time Machine by H.G. Wells (Tom’s recommendation) and Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner.

We then board a bus takes us to the old Ming Palace Ruins, the predecessor to the Forbidden Palace in Beijing. On the bus, we see a girl who gets off at the wrong stop and has to ask her friend who is on board for Y2 so she can get back on again. It is mildly funny! Nanjing people are funny! The Ming Palace Ruins turns out to be just a park with the front gate of the old palace and just an open space with some ruins/rocks which I presume used to be the palace… they weren’t lying when they said it was a ruin!

Nanjing Museum is okay. Not that much is labelled in English even though the Lonely Planet says otherwise. The most impressive thing of note was probably the lacquer-ware. Most other things in the museum I have seen before in either Beijing or Xian, though the Jade armour was pretty cool too! It is something I had read about as a kid in a children’s encyclopaedia. Spend a good two hours in there. Fall asleep on the bus journey home, so we decide against going to the Citadel, plus it was getting late and dark by then. We spend next three hours in an internet café playing Counter Strike! I forgot how fun it was to shoot random people!

We returned to the hostel to have dinner and chill out. I decide against going out on the town with Tom as I am still feeling ill and I have to be better for when I get to Shanghai. A lot of drinking to be done then! So I have a shot of Jim Bean and take a rain-check with Tom. He decides to go out and tries to find the girls who work at the hostel at a nightclub they said they would be at. I notice a picture of Sam in one of Tom’s photos! So that’s two different sets of people we both have met on our journeys!

I speak to the night porter at the hostel and it turns out he is from Guangdong. He tries talking to me in Cantonese, but I understood him better when he spoke Mandarin! I also find a guy from Hong Kong when I go to brush my teeth before bed. He is putting some facial scrub on… such a Hong Kong metrosexual!

Miles walked: 136.063m