Nanjing

So, train ride to Nanjing. Twas pretty good...it was a sleeper train, and I was on the middle bunk. Ugh there was no headroom and I basically had to jump off to get on the ground @___@. On the bus there was a mom and a daughter who carried a box, and eventually they showed me there was a duck inside xD So then Qiuqiu messaged my phone, telling me where I should meet her in the station.

People: Wu Bian is my mom's college buddy who lives in Nanjing. He owns some biotech company that's coincidentally going to work on something with my mom's lab. His wife is Xiao Rong, she and her older sister are famous in Nanjing because of their beauty salon chain. She ALSO happens to own a biotech company. Their daughter is Qiuqiu, an 18 year-old who graduated from high school but apparently didn't do too well on her gaokao (college entrance exams) and so is planning on going to college in the United States (UMD most likely).

First Impressions: Wow, Nanjing has clouds. Nanjing's much less polluted than Beijing (well, before the Olympics). Blue skies, clouds. It's also really really really really hot. Considered one of the "four big ovens" of China.

So we had trouble finding Qiuqiu (whom I have never met in my life) at the station, but eventually we realized it was a girl we had passed earlier. There was a man with her, and I was about to be like "Ni hao, Wu shushu (hello, uncle wu)" but then i realized it wasn't her dad. It was a chauffeur. @_____@ It ended up being Qiuqiu's aunt (xiao rong's older sister)'s chauffeur. wow. SOMEONE's loaded. He dropped us off at the Sun Yatsen Memorial Scenic Area, which is basically a mountain with lots of historically important things, including Sun Yatsen's tomb. We went to these gardens, which had a place called Bridge World, basically all kinds of bridges crossing this stream. And then we went to the Ming Tombs, which had a long road with stone animals on both sides. Overall, it was so boring. And hot. And sweaty.

Then we decided to leave, and got the chauffeur to take us back in the city. For our late lunch, we decided to eat teppanyaki, which was SO DELICIOUS. YUM. Then we went to Qiuqiu's aunt's house, and her aunt took us to dinner in an expensive looking place with expensive looking foods. The rest of the week we went to other places like the Confucius temple, Zhan gardens, the Zhonghua city gate, Song Meiling's villa, Sun Yatsen's tomb, the Presidential Palace, and the Nanjing Massacre museum. We also had a day to walk around Xinjiekou, some shopping place (I bought a Jay Chou piano book =]).

Our last night there, Wu shushu invited us to eat Nanjing local specialties. we ate things like duck blood, snails, stinky tofu, and chick embryo. Eww so you open the egg and there's this embryo staring at you, with eyes and beak and all. you pick it up with your chopsticks, dip it in some spiced salt, eat it (no bones or anything!). then you eat the yolk, which is bright yellow and covered with blood vessels. there's also some really hard protein cap or soemthing at the other end of the egg...

Qiuqiu's house was by far the best place I lived in China. My mom was like "Don't stay too long in Nanjing, you still have to go to other places." But I didn't want to...her house was just soo comfortable. Besides normal things like internet, tv, she also had a piano (ya i hammered away my jay chou quite a bit), a very comfortable bathroom (bathrooms can get pretty bad in china), great air conditioning, yummy snacks (stocked with things like chinese yogurt, bakery bread, Lipton Milk Tea Powder), and the world's most adorable puppy. Their house is a condo, the top 3 floors of an apartment building. Ahhhh it was so great living there. Unfortunately, we were going to leave for SHANGHAI the next day...