Campus Fountain

In the center of NJU campus there is a fountain which is turned on a couple of times a day. Music is played and in the evening there are coloured lights along with the spray. Surrounding the fountain is a cement wall and a hedge. During the week many grandparents bring the pre-preschoolers to the fountain to play. On the week-ends the parents and older children come.

Labour Day - May 1st

Today is Labour Day in China. It is a national holiday and there are no classes (not that I have any classes on Friday anyway but Bob does). This is the first year there hasn't been a seven day holiday for Labour day. It was called Golden Week, but the government saw fit to change Golden Week into several long week-ends instead, so this year we had Tomb Sweeping Day and Labour Day and will have Dragon Boat day at the end of May. Many people are upset about the change and there have been petitions about changing it back to a week, but no luck. We chose not to go travelling this week-end. There are very few students around the campus.

Last Friday we celebrated Bob's birthday a couple of weeks late by going out for Mexican Food with some friends. They came to our apartment after for brownies and ice cream.

Sunday night we had to do English Corner again. Does anybody have any suggestions for some good games to play with a group in a classroom? We have one more English Corner left. We did a get acquainted game, twenty questions and a guessing game where they had to draw pictures on the board for their group to figure out a word.

Summer and very hot weather has arrived in Nanjing. Many girls have their parasols or umbrellas out so they won't get a sun tan. I keep hoping it won't get any warmer until we leave at the end of June, although I am told it rains all May in Nanjing, so maybe it won't get too hot. The roses are out and are beautiful and the winter cabbage plants have all been changed. There are big lanterns hanging at the gate.

Since Times Grocery store is out of Dr. Pepper and we heard that they sometimes have it at a store in Aqua City (a new mall that opened last November) we decided to visit the Mall this afternoon. It is a big mall built around a dome with a round courtyard in the center. It is several stories high with two basements. Most of the stores are foreign such as Dockers, Lee, Polo etc. and the goods are very expensive. A pair of dockers would cost over half a months salary. The nice thing about the mall was that it wasn't crowded. Unfortunately we didn't find any Dr. Pepper. There are fountains all around the building.

We can buy the most delicious pineapple here in Nanjing and the nice thing about it is it is peeled when we buy it. We just have to slice it up.

Cooing

According to the dictionary coo is the soft murmuring sound of pigeons or doves. The cooing of pigeons here in Nanjing is not a soft murmuring sound. I haven't seen the pigeons but every morning at the crack of dawn (which these days is about 5:00 a.m.) we hear them. It is a very annoying sound. Later in the afternoon they are at it again. Anyone who want to hear the sound can follow this link:
http://www.tradebit.com/filedetail.php/838871-pigeon-sound-effect-wav

Would you believe that there are pigeon ringtones for cell phones. I guess you would wake up when you heard that ring on your cellphone.

This past week I only left the apartment to go to classes and once to go buy some Dr. Pepper. The balance of the time was spent on washing, ironing, marking papers and doing lesson plans. Probably it will be more of the same this coming week.

A Quiet Apartment

Edward and family left Thursday morning at 6:30 to go to the airport and catch their flight to Beijing. We left about the same time to go to our classes. When we got home our apartment seemed strangely silent. We were sad to have them leave.

Last Monday we visited Confucius Square in the rain. We had classes in the evening and Edward and Erica went to Bob's oral English class with him.

Tuesday we visited Sun Yat-Sens Tomb. It was a very hot day. After we came down from the tomb we visited the shops around and everyone bought silk pyjamas.

Wednesday we went to a large park that we had never been to before (Nanjing Yuhautai Memorial martyrs' cemetery). There are monuments to the martyrs who died for the communist cause. There is a martyrs museum as well.
Click on the above picture to make it bigger and read about the site.

School children visiting the site.

There was also a museum and gardens showing the famous Nanjing Stones. They are shiny little stones - agate I believe.





Peacocks are kept in a section of the park.

The Yu Hua pavilion was built on the site of an ancient pagoda.

Bob and Edward and family went out to lunch for Chinese Food. I had a class in the afternoon and didn't go with them, but they enjoyed their meal.

Now we have to get busy and prepare lessons and mark writing assignments.

Edward & family in China

April 9th was Bob's birthday. We both had 8:00 o'clock classes that morning. After classes I left Bob on his own to celebrate his birthday and I went by train to Shanghai where I met Edward and family. Bob couldn't come to Shanghai because he had two classes on Friday.

Edward and some of his children and I went to Pizza Hut for supper. They were all very tired after traveling from Calgary and Miranda was already asleep at the hotel.

Next day we visited some of the sights of Shanghai in our rented 17 passenger van. (We had a driver as well as the van.)

Our first stop was Yu Yuan Gardens with a dragon around one of the walls.


We spent a few hours on Nanjing Road, but didn't do any shopping. We ate at Subway and had ice cream treats at Hagen Daaz.

There were a few people on Nanjing Road that day.

We walked along the Bund viewing the high buildings on the other side of the Huangpu river and watching the boats travel down the river.

The most excitement we had that day was when the driver took us to the railway station. He tried to drive us down under the station where the taxis drop off and pick up. When he got part way down he decided that the extended van wouldn't fit under the entrance. Can you imagine wanting to back out with five hundred taxis behind. There were some loud words exchanged by our driver and a few other people.

We arrived in Nanjing in the evening.

Nanjing University North Gulou Campus

This afternoon we paid a visit to the Hongshan Zoo expecting to see the Pandas. Well the Pandas were on a trip to Shanghai, so we missed them. We saw White Tigers, tigers, panthers, Lynx, wolves, and monkeys.

The zoo is a very beautiful place which winds around a mountain. (I was going to say hill, but after having walked to the pagoda at the top I decided it was a mountain.)

Monkey enclosure with a monkey on top of the pole and pagoda in background

Miranda at the zoo

The zoo has a section with a ferris wheel and many other rides. We didn't go on any of the rides because we didn't have enough time (or maybe didn't want to spend the money).

There were people flying kites outside the zoo.

Tonight we went out and had hotpot for supper.

Cruise Notes

The food on the cruise was delicious. It was mostly Chinese Food but the desserts were western. The first morning we had a delicious breakfast - lots of bacon. The last evening we had heavenly apple pie. The good thing was that we were at a table next to our Chinese Guide, his wife and friends. They sampled one piece of the pie and decided they didn't like apple pie and gave the rest of the pie to our table. Two pieces of pie mmmmmm.

There was a group of people from India on the cruise. They weren't eating the same food as we were and we found out that they brought their own food and cook along.

We met a couple from Idaho on the cruise. He had had a stroke. The US doctors said there was nothing else they could do for him. They heard about a program for stroke victims in Xi an and so they sold their house and came to live in a rented apartment in Xi an. The cost of the program for inpatients was prohibitive, but he is able to go as an outpatient. He no longer needs his wheel chair and is expected to get rid of his cane shortly. They are very pleased with the program. It is a program of acupuncture, physiotherapy and massage.

Yangtze Cruise 2

On Saturday it was raining. On the hill is a relocation village for people who were displaced by the rising Yangtse. For some reason all the apartments in the relocation villages are white.
Here is the entrance to the first gorge, Qutang gorge, which we reached about 7:30 a.m.

We left the Victoria Katarina and went on smaller boats on a tour of the Lesser Gorges on the Danning river.
Later we switched to sampans for a tour of the Lesser-Lesser Gorges. There were about 30 of the sampans touring the river at the same time.




The water had changed from dirty yellow to a bright, beautiful green. It was much clearer than the water near Nanjing.
Back on the cruise ship we approached the Three Gorges Dam.
I have known the principle of locks for a good long time, but this was the first time I had experienced locks.
The gate is just opening to let our ship and several other boats into the lock.
Above the gate is opened up.

On ship beside the wall of the lock.

The process of going through the five locks took well over 4 hours. The gate of the last lock is just opening in the above picture and it was after 11:00 p.m.

The next morning we toured the area around the dam and then we boarded a bus to take us to the Wuhan airport. As soon as we left the sun came out and the clouds burned away.

We went through a mountain in the longest tunnel I have ever been in and after leaving the mountains passed through a large plain. There were miles and miles of fields of canola in bloom. I suppose that they need lots of canola because they use a lot of cooking oil. All the cooking oil in the markets is in very large containers. We have a hard time finding a smaller bottle for our needs.

In between the canola fields were dugouts where fish, crabs and shrimps are raised.

We also say many graveyards with brightly decorated tombs. (Grave sweeping day)

Partway to Wuhan our bus driver thought there was something wrong with the bus so we had to transfer to another bus.

The Wuhan airport was a very big, modern airport. It didn't seem to be too busy. We arrived back in Nanjing about 8:30 p.m.