Nanjing- Day 1!

Last night we left for Nanjing from the Beijing South Railway Station. It is definitely the nicest train station in Beijing! It took around an hour and a half to get there from Beida. We got there around 8pm and had until 9:30pm. We were all starved so a bunch of us got McDonalds. Heather and I paid for Tom's McDonalds since we owed him from the night he served as "Bank of Tom".

Thankfully we had soft sleepers both ways this trip! And the train was SO much nicer. They had tvs in each room. Heather, Katie, Laura and I shared a soft sleeper.

We now have more close friends! There names are Mariel, JiaHua and Perry. They hung out with us for awhile in our room. We drank wine in celebration of Heather and I becoming roommates. Then we went to sleep around 11:30.

This morning we arrived in Nanjing at 5:49am! SO SO SO early, especially after a week of not much sleeping and a lot of studying. We arrived at our hotel around 6:30am. We weren't able to check in until noon, but CIEE was able to get 5 rooms for us to use to clean up and change for the day.

We had breakfast in the hotel.... "breakfast". It's a good thing I like hard boiled eggs now otherwise I would have only eaten fried bread. I was so excited when I saw that they had orange juice.... until I was filling my cup and my hand was super hot. Of course... the orange juice is hot, the chinese LOVE hot drinks. Totally makes since?

After breakfast around 9:30 we went to the Zhongshan Mountain National Park. There we had free time to explore around on our own. Our tour guide told us that we should definitely go to the Linggu Pagoda and climb to the top to see the view. We (we includes our new friends!) decided to follow her advice.

The park was very cool and relaxing. We passed a lot of neat things, including the "roundest of holes". When we got to the Linggu Pagoda we only had about 30 minutes left until we had to meet back with the whole group.

The Pagoda had 9 floors! We first stopped at each floor and looked out but by the 4th floor we decided it would be best to go all the way to the top. We climbed 8 floors of spiral stairs. I was completely out of breath by the time we got to the top. It was totally worth it though! The view was absolutely gorgeous.

On our walk back to meet up with everyone we passed this guy who was melting glass to make different sculptures/animals. It was very cool, so I bought a glass pig!

Once the whole group was together we got on these little trains to go to lunch. Oh and it was raining all day long... so we were all freezing! The weather forecast said it was going to be 60 and sunny... lies. I guess the weathermen in China are just as great as the ones in the states!  Anyways... lunch was great! my favorite dish was qiezi which is fried eggplant. Who would have thought?

After lunch we went to this "bird farm". Honestly, I am TERRIFIED of birds. Big or small, birds scare me so much. So the entire time I just stood at the top, frightened the entire time. Almost everyone else was in the grass feeding the birds and the birds would fly on them and just sit on their shoulder, head, back, head, etc.

When everyone finally had had enough time playing with the birds (I had fun watching), we went to Sun Yat-sen's Mausoleum.  In order to get to his Mausoleum we had to walk up a billion stairs. So we made it fun and took a lot of pictures, including ones of us jumping. The Mausoleum wasn't that cool (sorry Sun Ya-sen).  However, the view from the top was gorgeous!

We got back to the hotel around 4pm. Heather and I were roommates :). We all decided to nap and then get dinner at 8pm.  We all agreed on going to Henry's Home Cafe and were so excited. The cab driver dropped us off and pointed across the street. So we walked over to find out that it wasn't there anymore. All the other restaurants around were really expensive so we decided to just go back by the hotel and have dinner.

After dinner we went to the night market that was right by our hotel. It was GREAT! This night market had all the movies and TV series you could possible want. And the most expensive TV series was $4. I bought soooo many... One Tree Hill, The OC, Friends, True Blood, the Twilight series and many more!

We left the night market around 10pm, absolutely exhausted! Tomorrow we are going to try to get Dim Sum and then go back to the market (it's also a day market... conveniently!).