Wednesday was our last day in Kunming. In the morning we had our final exam for reading/writing class. Went pretty well for me! We ended up going back to the hotel early, like around 10:00, so I started packing. In the afternoon I went with a small group of students who were invited to lunch with Cai Laoshi back at the same restaurant where we filmed last Friday. We were with a few teachers from Yunnan University as well as Cai Laoshi. Cai laoshi and the other teachers had to go early, and us students decided to go buy flowers for all the teachers before heading over to the graduation. Fresh flowers are a specialty of Yunnan Province, so they're really cheap. we got 7 bouquets of flowers for between 11-40 kuai each, which is somewhere between 2 and 7 USD. Then we had graduation, which was us getting certificates with our language partners. We also saw the second cut of the culture class video, which still reminded me of the opening montage of The Amazing Race. Cai laoshi said it'll be uploaded to Youtube when it's finished. Wednesday after graduation I went with Karolyn and a few other people back to the bird and flower market downtown. I got a couple last-minute souvenirs. We ended up at the same hibachi-style Chinese restaurant as last Friday for dinner. Delicious! :D That night there was baijiu-fueled revelry happening in the hotel, so I just internetted. Kunming-->Shanghai Thursday morning I finished packing my things and met Karolyn one last time to say goodbye. The night before I had bought a little Totoro ornament-diarama thing to give to her. She also gave me a small bag of Yunnan souvenirs, including a few bracelets from Lijiang and Dali, two places we didn't get to visit. It was really thoughtful of her! We left the hotel for the airport at 1pm. between doing group check-in, saying goodbyes to Destiny and Dong, going through immigration (since we were flying to Hong Kong it was an international flight), and going through security, we arrived at the gate just in time to start boarding. We were about 20 minutes delayed and it was a 2-hour flight to Hong Kong. Cai Laoshi had the same connection I'll have next week to get to her flight to Chicago, so from there we were on our own, kind of. Since 16 of us were all on the flight to Shanghai together, an airline rep came to get us from the gate and brought us to the next terminal for our Shanghai flight. As soon as we arrived they were ready to board, so we had no down time in the airports at all yesterday. The plane was one of the really really huge planes for long haul flights, so it was barely half full for our little 2-hour trip. Both flights we got meals though! Hooray airplane food! We arrived in Pudong Airport in Shanghai at around 9:30 at night, where the tour guide met us and then took us to the hotel. The bus was just barely big nough for the 16 of us...plus the luggage all up in the aisle and front of the bus. We didn't arrive at the hotel until after 11. The hotel was super fancy and I didn't get to bed till 12:30 or so. Shanghai-->Nanjing Our wake-up call was at 6 this morning (Friday). I had breakfast in the hotel and then we had to check out at 7:30. We could leave some luggage at the hotel for the week since we're coming back to the same place on Tuesday, so that's super helpful. I left my big suitcase there and I'm traveling with just my backpack and duffle bag for the week. It turns out that our tour group is with some other people too. They all seem to be Chinese-Americans. so in total our group is 36 people, including the 19 NU students. The weather in Shanghai was overcast and drizzly all day, which is good because it wasn't too hot. We had to leave at 8 this morning to go to our fist stop, which was a tourist trap of a shopping center with a templey thing in one corner. The general attitude of the group was discontent since we'v been in China for a month already and really had no reason to be in a shopping center. A few people went wandering in a neighborhood nearby during the hour we had there. If we end up at another place like that I'll consider exploring elsewhere too. It seems to be fine as long as we're back at the meetup place on time. After the tourist trap we headed to lunch at a big touristy resto. Compared to everything we've eaten so far on this trip, lunch was pretty forgettable. After lunch it was a 4-hour drive west to Nanjing. Nanjing was a former capital of China during the Ming Dynasty I believe. Compared to the megaopolis of Shanghai, Nanjing seems a little smaller. It was also overcast and drizzly in Nanjing. Coming into the city we passed through the only piece of Dynastic architecture left in Nanjing, part of the old city wall. Much of the city was destroyed in December 1937-January 1938 by the Japanese in the Nanjing Massacre, so even though it's a city rich in historical importance, there's not a whole lot left to see of the ancient city. Our first stop in Nanjing was the Sun Yat Sen Mausoleum. Despite the fact that Sun Yat Sen founded the Guomindang, he's still hailed as a historical hero in China because he essentially brought the end of imperial China in 1911. The Mausoleum is actually part of a really large park that'll be worth a couple days to explore if I come back to Nanjing. The mausoleum/memorial itself it s really really big hill. We took a tram to get to the base of the memorial, then it was a really long ramp and 392 stairs to get to the top where there's a really large statue of Sun Yat-Sen under a covered stone structure. The climb wasn't that bad, after every flight of stairs I stopped to take photos. We were getting a lot of laowai photos again, I guess foreign tourists aren't as common there. When I reached the top some of my classmates were there about to pose for a photo with a Chinese tourist. She told me my eyes are really big. >.> Our second stop was the Confucius Temple area (FuZi Miao). It's not actually a temple anymore. During the Ming Dynasty the area was a center where people would take the civil service exams, and the area eventually turned into a place where students would pray for good luck from Confucius when they had exams (I think. Parts of the story are fuzzy now). Anyways, the original buildings don't exist anymore but the area has been rebuilt in traditional Chinese-style architecture and it's a shopping center now. But the difference between this one and the one in Shanghai is that this one is actually frequented by local people. The last chapter I studied in the textbook actually talked a lot about the Confucius Temple area and it talked about the snacks (xiao chi) you can get there. So I went with a couple other people to try some food. We got some sort of meatball thing, some sort of goopy red bean soupy thing, and rice steamed in bamboo. I liked all of it. We also tried a fried potato swirly-cut and on a stick. A little expensive but I shared it with another person. Our next stop was dinner. We got to try Nanjing salted duck, which was pretty good and not too salty. After dinner we came to the hotel, which is even fancier than the one in Shanghai. This room can easily sleep a family of 7. The only weird thing is (and Thom, I remember you mentioning it last year) is that there's a giant window between the bathroom and the rest of the room. There's a shade though. xD Tomorrow we're doing more Nanjing things then we're heading to Wuxi!
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