Nanjing

My weekend is tues/wed at work bc the normal weekends are crazy busy at our school.  my friends and i decided to go to nanjing for the two days we had off last week.  we took a train there and back.....so fast...1.5 hrs on the way there and 1 hr 15 min on the way home..i love it!  i slept most of the way on the train b/c i was super tired.......and then i woke up to amazing green hills and tall trees..  i miss green hills and tall trees!  

this is our high speed train

once we got out of the train station we quickly found the lake and walked around it.  we had a slight agenda of things we wanted to do during our trip...but it was nice to just wander and stumble upon things.  it was pretty hazy out....so the colors are a lil gross in the pics.

 the lake

 fishing

 bamboo

 city wall

 cool bridge

me in front of the city gate

after wandering around the lake for a bit we stumbled upon an old part of the wall where we could go up and walk on it.  so, we paid 15 rmb and ran around the wall.  no one else was on it.....very cool!

 phil, megan, me and erik on the wall

 no one around!

 each brick has names of the people that built the wall

 cartwheel time

 pagoda

entrance to part of the wall

after the wall we ate some lunch at a random lil spot....luckily erik is fluent in chinese so he could read the menu and order for us :)  we then took a cab to dr. sun yet sen's mausoleum.  he is buried at the top of this mountain.  we had to hike up a lot of stairs...but it was worth it.

relaxing before the hike up

view from the top..amazing.  lil hazy....but still gorgeous with all the trees

we made it to the top

we checked into our hotel, dropped off our backpacks and took the metro.  now the metro only has 2 lines, so we had to ride it!  we got these cool lil blue tokens as our tickets.  we decided to just randomly take the metro somewhere and then walk to where we were gonna go.  we ended up walking about 1.5 hrs to get back to where we were going...but we saw so much of the city.   

  candied hawthorns

lights at night   

crazy lady that wanted a million pics with us and then followed us around to buy pics from a professional guy

 the art of jenga at a bar

wed am we got up, had some curry and then headed over to the nanjing massacre museum.  it was pretty interesting.....for sure had a cheesy and bias aspect to it.  we then headed over to the presidential palace where both sun yet sen and chang kai-shek both lived for a bit.

 massacre museum

 entrance to presidential palace

 the gardens

 thanks for a great trip!

 yay hibiscus

fun rock maze