Information on 'The Rape of Nanking' near the end of this entry.
Bla Bla and Yukki!

Hey Hey and a Big G'Day toya,
 
After chatting to Luo Wei I said good bye to the hotel staff and then walked down to Changjiang Donglu and towards the bus station dropping in for noodles on the way for breakfast. Once at the bus station (which I found on Minjilang Lu) I found a tout and followed him to the corner and was soon on a bus for 25 Yuan instead of 35/45 Yuan.
 
There was a young Chinese guy sitting beside me who works in advertising for the local newspaper and we chatted most of the way to Nanjing. When we arrived I found a big city and along with a big city I found people yelling and screaming at me for accommodation and cabs and a million other things.
 
WOW, all a bit hard to take after all the little quiet places I have been to.
All the accommodation wast too expensive so I grabbed a cab, gave him my limit and off we sped.
 
Many hotels of course said no to me as I was a foreigner and we finally found one that agreed to my amount and me being a foreigner. After saying good bye to the happy cabbie I went inside to book in to find the 'Complete BITCH' behind the counter had tripled the amount she had agreed upon a minute prior and then she wouldn't budge at all!
 
As she could speak and comprehend English rather well I told her 'what I thought of her and her hotel' and left. I then walked and walked and got completely lost and just as it began raining I spotted a sign saying 'Jasmine Hostel' with an arrow pointing up a small road off Shanghai Lu. Newly built, in fact still being completed each day, it really is a beautiful hostel.
 
The Hostel staff is an absolute dream to be around.
It is owned by a lady named Plum and her daughter Linda.
They, along with the rest of the staff are just beautiful!  


 
My room had been finished that day so I was the first person to sleep in my bed and use my bathroom. Everything is so clean and will be proudly kept that way. There is no smoking inside any of the buildings and free internet is available. It was a little too expensive for my budget and making it even more expensive was that there was no TV, kettle or towels in any of the rooms. That I guess is because it is a Hostel and not my usual cheap Chinese Hotel which has all the above for usually a lot less money.
 
What a Cheap Chinese Hotel doesn't have are other back packers and foreign people who can speak your language and whom you can sit with and play chess and talk about travel and plan the following day together or even plan to head to the next destination together. What a Cheap Chinese Hotel also doesn't have is a curfew for being home, for when the TV is to be turned off, for when the internet has to be turned off, for when you must be in your room.
 
As I walk most of the day and into the evening and then write and spend some time at the Net Bar or walking again I think Cheap Chinese Hotel suites me much better than a Hostel. The problem with spending the day with people I meet in Hostels is that I only get a tiny part of my day done. I want to walk everywhere and everyone seems to walk much slower than me and wants to catch a bus and the time spent figuring out which bus to catch is total waste of time, then there are the niggles between couples and all that jazz!
 
And nobody likes to zig zag anymore!
Why does no one like to zig zag anymore?
What's wrong with zig zagging?
Has zig zagging gone out of fashion or something?
 
Anyhow, before I headed out into the big wide world of Nanjing I sat to chat to some other travellers while transferring my LP map info onto my Chinese City Map. Hey, saves me doing it while walking!
 
It had stopped raining by the time I headed out so I zig zagged my way up to the Bell Tower and I then headed into Xuanwu Lu Gongyuan and followed the lake side bamboo tree pathway which also ran along side the huge old Ming Dynasty City Wall. I made my way to Jiannig Lu to find the Centre City Gate but sadly there was no Centre City Gate, just a huge round-a-bout where I chased a guy on a bike through the billions of cars and scooters trying to get a picture of him carrying a mid sized truck cabin on his three wheeler bike.
 
It really was an unbelievable sight.
And you know this when even the Chinese stop, get out of their car and stare!
 
I then headed across to Zhongshan Beilu and then back down Yunnan Lu which turns into Shanghai Lu. I now find myself in a little side street having BBQ and a beer and will soon head home to do some hand washing and have a well needed shower.
 
Oh yeah, over the past few days my day pack has begun to fall apart. Seriously, does everything have a time limit here in China and it then ALL begins to fall apart. Two zips have broken and now the main seem is coming apart. It was beginning to bother me any how as everything inside was getting wet from my sweat...ie: books, maps etc. This afternoon I spotted a 'real' camping store so I headed in to check out their micro-fibre clothes and spotted a pack pretty much the same as my 28 Litre 'Air Comfort' pack I use to travel. I didn't think much of it at the time and left after looking at the 'Real Prices' in the store.  
 
About an hour later my second zip broke and when I got my map out much of the pen had been smeared due to being wet.
 
That was enough for me. I headed straight back to the camping store, haggled like buggery and when I was happy I left with a new day pack. Well, a bit big for a day pack but it will do until I get home. This one will go to Amigo as a present for our travels in October. My aim has always been to find a very small version of my 'air-comfort' pack. I found one in Melbourne a few years ago but never thought to buy it then. A real bugger for me! Anyhow, this pack is around eighteen or so litres and also has 'Air-Comfort' (kind of like a trampoline that sits on your back so the pack doesn't and remains dry). So as I met her on her Birthday I figure this will be a nice late birthday present.
 
Ok, Nanjing so far...
 
Twice China's capital. Once during the Ming Dynasty (AD 1368-1644) and secondly during the 20th Centaury. So far I've found it to be a rather leafy place to walk around, especially for a big city with around 5,320,000 people in it! Supposedly the area has had humans in it for around five thousand years. It has had glory along with being totally demolished during past ancient wars.
 
It was during the Ming Dynasty that the walls were built.
Rather impressive walls believe me!
 
I guess the city has seen conflict for most of its existence. The reason I came here was to visit the 'Memorial Hall of the Nanking Massacre'. Sadly it is closed until December for renovations.
 
For those interested read the book 'The Rape of Nanking' by Iris Chang.
 
It tells the story of what happened in and after December 1937 when the Japanese army arrived in the city. Several weeks later over 300,000 people had been raped, tortured and murdered. The Japanese army outdid the Romans at Carthage and the Christians during the Spanish Inquisition. When thinking about the brutality of what happened in Nanjing think of it this way. Hitler killed around 6 million and Stalin around 40 million but these guys took many years to do such. In six weeks the Japanese army killed well over 300,000 people. To make it easier to comprehend, that is more than both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs combined.
 
What did the nasty little buggers do?
 
They used the men for bayonet practice, soaked them in petrol and set them on fire, machine gunned them line by line, filled lakes with them, buried them up to their waists or heads and set German shepherds on them, used them for decapitation contests and made them rape their wives and daughters in front of their family.
 
The women (young girls, pregnant women, the elderly and even nuns) they raped, disembowelled, sliced off their breasts, nailed them alive to walls, ripped out their unborn, roasted them, hung them by their tongues, raped them with bats until they bleed to death and gang raped them over a period of weeks until they died.
 
You would think the rest of the world would know about such a thing wouldn't you. Strangely, when even the Nazi's in the city at the time were shocked at what was happening before them, barely anyone knows of this and the Japanese government still won't admit to it happening. They have deleted it from their history books and school text books and this is the main reason behind the 'tension' between China and Japan.
 
Yet they still accept compensation from the American government for the two bombs that killed less of their own people than they killed in Nanjing.
 
The world is sometimes a very strange place that is full of strange happenings and strange people!
Sickening for want of a better word!
 
Now I don't want to write anymore.
I feel a bit Bla Bla and Yukki!
 
Beers N Noodles toya.....shane
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The soundtrack to this entry was 'The 3rd and The Mortal'
The album was 'Tears Laid on Earth'