Nanjing

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We arrived in Nanjing about 4pm and walked to our hostel. Yet again we reaslised about 30 minutes later we were walking in the wrong direction, and after asking every other person for directions (including 2 school girls who couldn't stop laughing at us) we eventually found our hostel. As it was late we just chilled in our hostel bar upstairs and grabbed some of the free bbq on offer. We got speaking to a guy and a girl from Sweden, the big, blonde guys name was Bjorn and it was instantly apparent he was mine and Nod's kind of guy. With a big day ahead of us we decided to have an early night and all meet again tomorrow night for a few drinks.

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The following day we headed towards this national park with a massive mountain in the middle. There are loads of temples, pagodas, walks e.t.c. but the real reason we went there is to swim. We were having major withdrawl symptons having not swam since we left the UK and apparently half way up the mountain is a lake you can swim in. The trek, and it was a trek, up this fairly big mountain took us a good 3/4 hours but half way up it was all worth it when we managed to take a dip. Now the water was not the cleanest I have ever been in, and all the old Chinese guys who were swimming kept doing the old Chinese favourite of spitting their flem out every 2 seconds but it was still good. After dragging ourselves out of the water/flem we climbed the rest of the mountain which was a bit of a struggle to say the least. I have never been as out of breath and it was a really steep climb but worth it when we got to the top and had an awesome view all over Nanjing. We didn't hang around at the top for long though as the chair lift which takes you back down closed any minute and there was no way we were capable of climbing back down. The 25 minute chair lift back down was really good, just relaxing after the climb and taking in all the views. Absolutely shattered we got the bus back to the hostel, had a quick nap then joined up with the Swedes for some thouroughly deserved drinks.

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The following day we tried to go to the Nanjing memorial museum. Just before the Second World War Japan invaded Nanjing, the people who governed Nanjing scarpered and locked all the people within the city walls to try and defend it. It turned into a bit of a massacre with countless thousands of people being murdered and raped. However we were refused entry because we had flip flops on which was a bit strange so we called it a day and chilled out with a movie. That evening we met up with a group of people who are studying in Nanjing. A few Aussies, a Dane, French and a few others and went to a cool little bar they knew which did excellent Mexican food. Something we were craving for after weeks of Chinese food. After filling ourselves with burritos and sangria we headed back to the students apartment for some more drinking which carried on until about 8am and ended up with breakfast in McDonalds!

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The following day with a monster hangover we dragged ourselves to the massacre museum, this time with shoes on. We are glad we went there and it was very interesting but the stories and pictures and videos were really graffic and pretty haunting. Definitley a sobering experience. Suitably sobered we headed for the train station for our train back to Xi'an. Fingers crossed this time we actually get to see the Terracotta Warriors!