Further Wanderings

Because Chinese New Year (and its concurrent travel rush) was fast approaching (10 days away as of our arrival in Nanjing) we didn’t have as much flexibility with our time in Nanjing as we would’ve liked. So we were stuck with a mere 48 hours in the beautiful and historic city of Nanjing.

Fortunately our Couchsurfing host there, Wendy, helped us make the absolute most of our time there.
Wendy came to the huge Nanjing south station to meet us. Nanjing south is the second largest train station in the world by floor area, so it took us a while to meet up, but when we finally did it was straight into the action.

We drove into the centre of Nanjing and parked at a fancy water-themed shopping mall so we could explore the busy parts of the city on foot. Our first stop was a Cantonese restaurant where Wendy had picked up a voucher for a banquet-style meal on a one day deals website (a la Oneday or Groupon) and we enjoyed a huge, multicourse lunch to fuel us up for the rest of the day.

Sarah and I in front of the former imperial civil service examination hall
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When we last parted company, Sarah and I had just boarded our train to Qufu.
Where is Qufu you ask? It’s in Shandong province, roughly 500km south of Beijing.
And why were we going to Qufu you ask? Well, primarily because Sarah liked the name, and liked the idea that we could take a choo choo to Qufu (In Pinyin, the standard Romanisation of Chinese, a Q is pronounced similarly to a CH in English, so it’s alliterative.) We were headed south towards Nanjing and Shanghai, but this seemed like an awfully large part of the country to cover without even stopping once, so Qufu it was.

The main gate in old Qufu’s town walls
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Our return to Beijing began with the 9 hour train trip back from Harbin. And while this was mentioned briefly in the last entry, I also need to include one more thing: kvass! While still in Harbin we were looking for a ... [Continue reading this entry]

Our return to Harbin (actually Ha-er-bin) was managed with little fuss, though a bit more expense than we'd planned... The trip back to Yabuli village cost us 60 yuan, the bus another 90 each, where if we'd just waited a ... [Continue reading this entry]

A first! A special guest entry. I figured that since Sarah's the more experienced skier of the two of us (and the one who was more excited about skiing in China) that she ought to have a go ... [Continue reading this entry]

I now realize that I began the last entry by saying we had big plans in Beijing, but except for the whole celebrating Christmas bit, I pretty much failed to explain what these were. Which is fine in many ways, since ... [Continue reading this entry]

After a bit of drama with our mobile phone battery dying we squeezed on to the subway and met up with our couchsurfing host Jema, then squeezed onto a bus and made our way out to her place in Tongzhou ... [Continue reading this entry]