Weekend trip to Nanjing
After the trip to Beijing, was time to visit the old South Capital of China: Nanjing. It was really nice, Nanjing looks like a small countryside town – still “big” for our western standards but extremely peaceful. We got there in the late morning and hanged around the city center visit some interesting spots. First of all a Confucianism Temple, a very interesting place inside the main turist area which in it’s extremely simpleness still preserve it’s magnificent peace.
Walking around we reached the city walls and had that terrible idea to climb up for a while, it was midday and more than FOURTY degrees were burning us out! Fortunately we ended up our day walking into a very nice landscaped chinese park in the middle of the city, a green and relaxing spot – and by the way also extremely refreshing!
The following day we scheduled to visit the famous Dr. Sun Yatsen Mausoleum and the mountain where it’s builded on. Again, the weather wasn’t on our side – extremely hot and humid! But we made it, we walked up to the top and back down (with the help of one of the longest ropeway’s I’ve ever seen!)
The mausoleum was not that wonderful spot (also because the foggy and humid landscape closed up a little bit the panoramic view) but we had a great time starring at chinese people addicted to stairs walking up the hill to meet the Dr. in his eternal peace!
As in Beijing, the most important (at least to me) spot came by on the last day. We took a bus to the Memorial Hall of the Nanjing Massacre, that was built in the early years to remember what Japanese people did to chinese population during the first 50 years of the past century.
Every little piece of the museum was there only to emphasize the strong desease that japanese brought to China – chinese visitors were all looking at the pictures with a shocked expression. Some were really rude, scary, shocking – mostly when you reach the skeleton “open-air” exposition, where killed chinese people are shown in a big glass box.
This time I’m really leaving a city which survived from such a strong and great power. And this time I’m not really in the mood to end up a post with a word different from Peace.