Nanjing

Wider, less rugged, friendlier by far than Shanghai, twice the capital of China, the city was occupied by Japanese forces before World War II, becoming the site of an infamous six week massacre, the subject of Iris Changs book The Rape of Nanking. Now is not the time to accidentally slip into Japanese.

At the memorial hall a man, clearly old enough to at least have been a young boy at the time of the massacre, idly wandering through the exhibits, hacked up a huge ball of phlegm, and leisurely spat it out in a cushion of saliva. It landed with a resonant splat, punctuating the pre-recorded machine-gun fire. His manner declared that this was by no means a gesture of contempt, rather of necessity. Not a minute later, he lit up a fag and had to be scolded by a security guard.

This "I-don't-give-a-damn" attitude is something that's struck me particularly hard since coming here. People openly stare at us, blatantly laugh at our （admittedly hilarious） attempts to communicate, queues are formed seemingly by coincidence, the streets are littered with fag butts, bags, phlegm wads, traffic lights are all but ignored, horns are honked at the slightest provocation or appear to be essential to the running of the vehicle, waiters and waitresses seem openly put out that they should have to do anything at all...it's quite refreshing in an odd way, and certainly an enviable attitude to bear. Could this charging confidence be the result of over 3000 years of continuous civilisation?

Recently I've been thinking about a man I once served in the Library. A Chinese student ignored the orderly line in front of the issue desk and went straight to the first vacant booth she saw. The man called after her
"We have a little system in this country called queueing."
I keep wondering how long he'd last here.

Nanjing in Pictures

Inside Shanghai Train Station

So at the time of writing and posting these photos we have experienced the Chinese rail system three times. It's been awful everytime. After having bought the tickets we make our way into the station, each time being like a shaken champange bottle wanting to burst. Everyone is on their own in the fight to get through, to WHERE! we're all going to the same place and we all have tickets, why push?, why hit?, why barge?... What? what is the hurry? I have to say that this is worse than any commuter train I've travelled in Japan. Look at the calm before the storm above. We travelled hard seat which was quite soft for only 2 hours to a lovely, and a little less crazy Nanjing.

Nanjing Station

Nanjing is right next to the Yangzi River which is where the Grand Canal links up this river up with the Yellow River, I wanted to see this and to see this we had to get up high. We took the first whole day to explore the surrounding 'Purple Mountians'. We walked and walked and then took a cable chair up and up, and then walked some more. We must have walked over ten miles that day or at least it felt like it the next few days, where we could hardly walk anymore, so we discovered the metro line for the rest of our time there.

A scary half hour trip on the cable car.

At the end of this path down the Purple (more like green) Mountain, we were greeted by two big grumpy men that demanded we pay the steep entrance fee to the end of the park containing a nine storey Pagoda and some interesting buildings or walk back the way we came... we paid and got a bus back down to the city.

Ouch!

Shanghai in Pictures

Our Hotel for 3 nights called the JinJiang Inn.

Yunnan Road (recomended food street), where we saw lots of animal innards and strange fish all being prepared on the streets, plus a man pouring out a load of toads from a bag into a small tub. This didn't really stir my appetite, along with the smells too, until we turned a corner and found a restaurant that had all its food safely behind doors and indoors. What you don't know, won't harm you, came to mind.

Discarded chopsticks.

The Bund


Old Town

The location of the original Shanghai, the oldest part of of the city has deffinately been marked by the present, much like everywhere we've seen, roads ending abruptley, buildings half built, or half distroyed, out with the old in with new we might say, the Chinese say jiude buqu, xinde bulai meaning if the old doesn't go the new won't come.

We did seem to catch some glimpses of the 'real' Shanghai occassionally, but what that is we can't say, everything seemed to be a mash of styles, ages, classes, a confusion as what it wants to be or even what has been.

Shanghai

At the estuary of the Huangpu river, the city rightfully calls itself the gateway to China. It's a city with a million faces, sounds and smells, bustling, noisy, densely polluted; the backstreets of Shanghai are a near permanent construction site, a primordial soup that bore the first congress of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921, and now the soil from which a new China grows.

Crumbling ramshackle buildings cluster beneath colossal space-age edifices, the roads are rough and the taxi drivers rougher, ploughing an unstoppable madcap furrow, regardless of man or beast, much like the pedestrians themselves.

Shanghai carries itself with a casual, almost slovenly swagger, self-assurance, nonchalance, a seething and aggressive existence. After the clinical theme park that is Japan, Shanghai is like a different planet.

The Su Zhou Hao

This is the Boat we were on for exactly 46.15 hours, Starting last Friday the 4th and arriving on the 6th, and I still have those sea legs now.

Bye Bye Japan! Morning of the 5th

On the boat entertainment

Canteen

Arriving in Shanghai

Last night in Japan

Worse for wear after an overnight bus from Tokyo to Osaka, we find ourselves in the peaceful, yet slightly surreal Nagai Youth Hostel, a gently curving corridor of dorms and guest rooms, peppered with baths and the usual suspects of facilities, at the back end of a gigantic stadium. At the moment of writing, Hayley is relaxing in an onsen whilst I am typing against the clock of a coin-operated computer, slower than a leaden tortoise with a hangover. Soon, we shall go for food in Osaka, the culinary capital of Japan.

Yum.

To Osaka - Leaving Japan

After a tearful and unexpected audience of well wishers wished us goodbye from Oda, we made ourselves at home in Brian and Kaoris lovely place, the hostess with the mostest was Mr Hughes, who fed and watered us with an American style breakfast the first morning and a continental style breakfast the next morning, after a drunken bout of Kareoke with all our lovely friends...


Thank you Brian! x

Wednesday night we had booked for a 12 hour, overnight journey to Osaka, the port we would be leaving from for our ferry to Shanghai. We arranged to have a last minute farewell with a few friends in the crazyness of Tokyo Station. We tearfully said goodbye to, Brian, Jula, Rosie and Kim & Kame, (Katsuhisa) just for the records Kim!

Kim and Kame

Jula

and Rosie