My first weekend adventure

Alright so attempt #2 getting this blog post up. Due to poor planning and shoty internet the first time i tried to post this i lost it all! So i didn't realize how much i needed to get out of the city until i was sitting in complete silence outside of a temple from the Ming Dynasty.
This past weekend a group of 13 Alliance students went to 南京 a city about 2 and a half hours outside of Shanghai （上海） Nanjing （南京） used to be the capital of China before it moved to Beijing after the civil war. While it is right behind Shanghai for most economic city in eastern China it felt less overwhelming than Shanghai.
Ok so in America （ 美国） we have pretty big personal bubbles. Think of when your sitting in the airport and there always seems to be at least one seat in between people and most people would choose to stand rather than take that awkward open seat in between two people. Well in China that bubble doesn't really exist. When we got to the waiting room at the train station, being the Americans（美国人） we were we sat on the end by ourselves with at least a chair from the person next to us. As the room started to fill up, people orderly and naturally sat in those "safety" seats. Not only when sitting down does the bubble shrink but when walking anywhere running into someone like they weren't even there is natural. Think New York City to the next power! When you have that many people in such small places i can't blame them for doing what that need to to sit down or get around.
As we got 15 minutes outside of the city I saw a very different view of 中国. There were run down shacks sitting on piles of garbage covered in smog. The layout of the cities that we passed through seemed to consist of a few sky scraping apartment buildings and then a few smaller buildings. On the train i was sitting next to a woman from China who was telling me how about 80% of the people in China （中国） are workers and they aren't treated well, which was evident in theses cities. While the peasants represent such a huge portion of the population that only represent 8% of the National Peoples Congress. I'll explain more about NPC in one of my next posts but if you interested in the framework of the Chinese political system i really encourage you to look it up, i just started learning about it today and there is so much more to they system then i expected.
OK back to 南京.....when we got into town we were able to bargain a good price for all of us to take a bus to our hotel (less than $2). When we arrived we were impressed, it had a bell boy and water fountain out front, now thats living high class, and i was less than $35 dollars for 2 nights. Well much to our dismay we were at the wrong hotel, our hotel was the sister hotel and it didn't even et the name hotel it was an "inn". None the less it was nice, comfy beds and hot showers. Lets be real, things in 中国 are cheap but not that cheap.
After we checked in we went to a night food market and i tried fried doughy squid balls, (Dad aren't you impressed you didn't even have to bribe me!). Nanjing seemed to have much fewer westerns than Shanghai, at least in the places we were. Even at the tourist spots my blonde hair stood out. Since it's less touristy people seemed to be more interested in us, a group of clearly western students （学生）. That night we went to a local bar and met so many great people. Many of them wanted to speak english so they would strike up a conversation, it was much less divided between expats and locals than Shanghai （上海）.
On Saturday （星期六） we visited the Sun Yet-San Maseolium. When we were buying our tickets there was a sign for all the discounts and the list included students, minors, the elderly, retired, serviceman, disabled and teachers, all pretty normal but it also said that one adult can take a child under 1.3 metes in for free, model workers, model heroes or models of morality at or above the municipal level got a discount, that made me wonder what the criterion was to be a "model". My politics professor, Dr. Liu, explained to me that this concept was emphasized due Mao's era. They wanted to promote ideals that benefited the Party while also empowering the people, giving them a role in the revolution. Being named a moral worker is decided by a committee that is part of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) but you do not have to be part of the Party to receive this title.The idea of a moral worker is not looked up to as much anymore because the criterion is more lenient now, there isn't a cookie cutter idea anymore. In my professors case he was named a moral worker at Fudan University after a year of working there but that wasn't as important as publishing work and succeding in the academic community. Also religious circles got a discount with a valid certificate, i wonder if my Dad's alter boy of the year certificate could work!?
For those of you who have not read your Chinese history books, Sun Yet San was the leader of the Nationalists (KMT) who fought against the Communists (CCP), who were lead by Mao（毛）. Sun Yet-San was also instrumental in the overthrow of the Qing dynasty. Once the internet decides to start cooperating i will hopefully load pictures of it! But it was placed on top of a hill and it overlooked this beautiful forest and well what we thought was a pretty haze ended up being smog, heres to pollution!
Some of you may be asking yourselves why the name Nanjing sounds so familiar but can't quite put your finger on it well this might be your answer, the Nanjing Massacre, also called the Rape of Nanjing. The Japanese occupied Nanjing for 6 weeks and killed around 350,000 people in cold blood and raped thousands of women. It was a true massacre, the Japanese were ruthless. However, like in many cases of history the Japanese claim that about 25,000 were killed, huge difference! In front of the museum were statues of people trying to flee the massacre. It was very moving, it brought this massacre to a more personal level, underneath the statues had the dialogue of the people. One of the statues was of a man dead and a child laying on of him and then another child standing just looking on in pain at the Japanese trail of destruction.

Now im home safe and ready for my next adventure. I'm getting involved in a program in Shanghai to teach english to 17-23 year old orphans and plan weekend activities with them. It seems like a great opportunity to get involved int he community and venture outside of the areas i know. Also, February 14th is the Chinese New Year so there will all sorts of celebration in Shanghai. They are already started shooting off fireworks that sounds like bombs everytime! On the 16th i leave for a 2 week long adventure to Yunnan Province in southern China. I'm not exactly sure what to expect from this but its much more rural than Shanghai and i've heard its beautiful.

Like always keep in touch!

xoxo,
Aryn