5/17/2014
Photo 1: Mystery Nanjing task #13: Take a picture of one or more of your group holding a baby (10 points)
Photo 2: Mystery Nanjing task #4: Take a picture of one or more of your group sitting in the driver's seat of a public bus (20 points)
Photo 3: Swimming under Purple Mountain (5/18)
We started our day very solemnly by visiting the Nanjing Massacre Museum. For those of you who don’t know, the Nanjing Massacre Museum is a government-sponsored museum that commemorates the Rape of Nanking where Japanese soldiers invaded the city and killed 300,000 people approximately (according to museum). It was very interesting and filled with a lot of apparent propaganda but it was good to experience to help understand a piece of the feeling that the Chinese have about the 100 years of humiliation.
At twelve we started “Mystery Nanjing”, an Amazing Race-style scavenger hunt that had us running throughout the city and completing various tasks, and obtaining photographic evidence, of course. Some of the challenges were easy, like eating stinky tofu and finding a man with a beard, and others were a bit more difficult, like finding twin babies to hold. Kim, Hochang, Rebecca, and Jimmy tried to convince Dong Laoshi that twin puppies count as twin babies but that was a stretch and luckily they didn’t get those points. My group (Molly, Alvin, Judy, and I) was the first group ever in Dong Laoshi’s eight years on this dialogue to get a picture with someone in the driver’s seat of a public bus. We got onto the bus while the driver was sleeping and Alvin sat in the drivers seat. Then the driver woke up, looked at us and went right back to sleep. My group was also the only group on this dialogue to get a picture in the driver’s seat of a taxi, and this time was even with the driver’s permission.
Later, a group of us went to a hole in the wall restaurant with Dong Laoshi and Alex for dinner. You had to walk up this alley into what appeared from the outside to be a residential area, but actually had a few small restaurants. We had some great food and got to hear a lot of stories. Dong Laoshi told us this one story about when she was in college one of her favorite teachers was sick and a group of students decided to bring her home-made chicken soup so they went to the store and bought a live chicken. Dong Laoshi got the honor of actually killing the chicken and made a delicious soup, she even offered to give us more tips later.
We then went to a fruit market that smelled delicious and the food tasted even better. If you bought a pineapple there they would cut it up for you in a cool spiral shape. I was going to get one but the guys cutting them were super talkative and they intimidated me and my limited Chinese skills, so I ended up just getting an apple, dragon fruit, a melon, and grapes. I then learned to wash your grapes before eating them or else deal with the consequences the next morning when you want to go on a bike ride to Purple Mountain (update: I went anyways and it was awesome. Definitely one of my favorite memories from China so far)
Conley Rozek
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