Last Night in Nanjing - Day 19

Aided by a dictionary and a few helpful Chinese girls, Sophia and I managed to get three train tickets to Shanghai departing tomorrow morning. Beijing train station fades in comparison to Nanjing railway station, at least when it comes to the amount of hassle, noise and general disorder. I have a feeling that we should get there well in time before our train leaves. The tickets cost us almost as much as our Beijing-Nanjing ones! (About 15EUR for a 75 min train ride is not cheap in China. But hey, it's Shanghai, the most expensive place one can find in Middle Kingdom... Remind me why we are going there again?!)

Our last afternoon in Nanjing was spent in Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall, a quite gloomy place commemorating the 300,000 thousand civilians who died in the "Rape of Nanjing"; this nice little atrocity conducted by the Japanese in the 1930s. Even to this day the Chinese seem to feel very upset about this event (and I wouldn't deny them the right to feel pissed off at the Japanese), so the memorial hall was in no way an impartial or some sort of reconciliatory effort from the Chinese side. If I were a Japanese visting, I'd definitely get affected by the hostile environment.

Taking a bus to the memorial hall was a rather fun experience, because of the crazy traffic. We were in awe of how our driver (a girl who looked our age) navigated the streets without hitting all the scooters, pedestrians and bikers.

The rest of the night was spent hunting for something warm to eat. We were informed by our Taiwanese roommate that the Mandarin part in our vegan passport is written in an old variant of Chinese, which is harder for mainland Chinese people to understand... No wonder they never get the message! It generally works better to just point at the pictures of cow udders and pigs while franticly shaking your head, then point at carrots and nod as if your life depended upon it.
We also had another Chinese girl write down the simplified characters for meat, eggs and milk so we might show that to the food vendors and shop owners.
It's still possible to find decent grub if your willing to look for a little while. And as we've mentioned earlier, tofu is ubiquitous.

Now we have to go and get our sh*t together and get ready for bed. We'll report to you from Shanghai!

//R