Friday, June 19th, 5:00 PM (Nanjing, China)

Goodbye Nanjing

Happy Friday, everyone! It is with mixed emotions that I write this last post from Nanjing. I intend to spend most of this post discussing the city as a whole and remembering some of the highlights of my stay here. Before I do that, however, I also did a few things this week worthy of mention.

This week’s class was about thermodynamics. I don’t know why, but the material seemed difficult to me. I thought the test was hard, but in the end, I still got an A+ for the course. Woo hoo! My afternoons this week have also been somewhat relaxed. On Monday afternoon, I returned to the Confucius Temple. Again. Obviously I really enjoyed spending time there. On Tuesday, I think I took a nap and hung around the hotel with the group. Nothing special there.

Wednesday’s excitement was going with Jeffrey to get a massage. I’ve never had a massage before, but at 45 Yuan ($6.50) for an hour, I couldn’t pass it up. The guy who did my massage was pretty young, and therefore I question if he knew what he was doing. He massaged my head, arms, legs (front and back), back, and neck. It was great except for my back… where I was sore for about a day! Oof. Nonetheless, it was a fun experience and (I’m fairly sure) I’m glad I did it! After the massage, Jeff and I found a corner stand and bought some authentic salted duck! We one half of two different types: light and dark. On the spot, the lady took each whole duck and hacked it (skin, bones, and all) into neat, cross sectional slices. They put each in a tray and we returned to the hotel with our duck. It was very tasty but also very salty! YUM!

On Thursday, I went for a walk before playing Chinese Chess with Jun, one of our student guides. My record against him is 1-2 now… and only because he let me win when he taught me. It’s quite the game, that’s for sure. It’s fairly easy to pick up the rules, but learning strategy is a completely different matter. Oh well, I have a set, so now I’ll have to teach some people and see if I can get better at it. After chess, we had our closing banquet with our SEU hosts. As usual, the meal came complete with a variety of foods I hadn’t ever tried, the obligatory fish with head and tail, and even a plate of snails! The snails were SO good… I definitely want to have more of those! Mmm. Anyway, there were many gifts to be passed around and we had a nice dinner.

Earlier in this post, I said I wanted to reminisce over my time in Nanjing, but now I think I’m going to leave a cliff hanger. Instead, I think it would be more appropriate to look forward to Beijing. Thus, here is a schedule of our remaining time in China. Currently it is almost 4:30 pm Beijing time or 4:30 am Friday EDT. For the next 24 hours, I will be finishing up packing, relaxing with the group, and maybe going to see one or two more casual things in Nanjing. We will have a couple meals as a group, but I also hope to have a couple more corner-store dumplings. Hmm- should I have rice, meat, or red bean? Or maybe I should have a sesame ball? I don’t know. Maybe all of it.

Tomorrow, we’re catching a 9:30 pm (Sat AM EDT) train out of Nanjing Railway Station, on the north side of Xuanwu Lake. Apparently we have soft berth tickets, so we’ll be able to sleep during the 8 hour or so train ride. For a comparison, Nanjing is at almost the same latitude as Atlanta and Beijing is at the same latitude as Philadelphia. It may not look far on a map, but looks can be deceiving. Arriving in Beijing on Sunday morning (Sat PM EDT), we will probably stop by the hotel and then head on our way. I don’t know what we’re seeing each day, but before we depart Beijing on Wednesday, we will be visiting the Great Wall, the Bird’s Nest Olympic Stadium, the Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square, and (I think) Pearl Market. In addition, evenings are on our own, so I may attempt to go see an opera and/or meet up with the Caldwell group who happens to also be in Beijing, preparing to leave. We’ll see.

Our Boeing 777 flight leaves on Wednesday at 4:10 pm (Wed AM EDT) and arrives in Chicago at 4:30 pm CDT. How about that 20 minute flight to go half way around the world?! We will clear customs *crosses fingers* and then catch an 8:55 pm CDT flight that will arrive in Raleigh just before midnight.

Thursday will be my final blog post with highlights from Beijing as well as enough reminiscing, comparing, and concluding to make everyone tired of reading. After all, I have a 13 hour plane flight (and a “D” seat… UGH!) to write everything I can think of!