Today I decided I needed to start heading back to Nanjing. I have been travelling for a month and a half, and the wear and tear of the road, along with two bouts of food poisoning and some cold weather, are hitting home. I have about a week until classes start, and travel will not be easy at this time of year.
I said goodbye to my travel companions, and headed off to the train station. Unfortunately, in this little stop along the line you cannot book train tickets. All you can do is wait for a train to come and hope there is a seat for you. There was no seat for me today, so I will probably catch an early bus to a city tomorrow morning and see what I can do from there. On the up side, while waiting for the train I spent the day exploring this little village on the hillside below the train tracks. This is real small-town China. This is where 60 per cent of the Chinese population lives, far away from the lights of Shanghai and Beijing. If Joe Biden was Chinese, this is where he would say he was from.
I said goodbye to my travel companions, and headed off to the train station. Unfortunately, in this little stop along the line you cannot book train tickets. All you can do is wait for a train to come and hope there is a seat for you. There was no seat for me today, so I will probably catch an early bus to a city tomorrow morning and see what I can do from there. On the up side, while waiting for the train I spent the day exploring this little village on the hillside below the train tracks. This is real small-town China. This is where 60 per cent of the Chinese population lives, far away from the lights of Shanghai and Beijing. If Joe Biden was Chinese, this is where he would say he was from.
Cabbage
There are no restaurants, no hotels, not much to see, and not much to do. Nevertheless, I think these places are beautiful. The tumbling, ill-matched brick houses have a surreal, Tim-Burtonesque appeal. The patchy fields around the outskirts embody the unspoken law of the Chinese countryside: If you aren't doing anything else with this place, plant cabbages.
Down one side street I stumbled across this simple ancestral temple, piled with offerings of apples and incense. Outside, the names of benefactors are inscribed on a stone block. One patron, it seems, has been donating three yuan to the temple's upkeep every year for as long as the inscriptions have been written.
Down one side street I stumbled across this simple ancestral temple, piled with offerings of apples and incense. Outside, the names of benefactors are inscribed on a stone block. One patron, it seems, has been donating three yuan to the temple's upkeep every year for as long as the inscriptions have been written.
If anyone can help me identify the right-hand character, I would be obliged.
On what probably stood for main street, this crowd of gentlemen had a great time gawking at me, but were less enthusiastic about having their picture taken (as you can see here). That's likely because they are gambling, an activity more or less illegal in China.
I have never seen this particular game before, but it seems they are playing some kind of game with dominoes. Unless the readers of my blog are in law enforcement and have Sherlock Holmes like powers of deduction, I would imagine they are safe for now.
I have never seen this particular game before, but it seems they are playing some kind of game with dominoes. Unless the readers of my blog are in law enforcement and have Sherlock Holmes like powers of deduction, I would imagine they are safe for now.
The hills above the village are planted with tea. The very beginnings of the new leaves that will be picked in this year's harvest are just beginning to poke out their light green heads.
In the hills, I ran into these four girls. Three were two embarrassed to talk to me, but the twelve year old in the yellow jacket is proud of her standard Chinese, learned in boarding school in the city. She showed me around the mountain, and rattled on about her parents, her school, and an old man she saw on TV who exercised so much that his hair turned back from grey to black.
In the hills, I ran into these four girls. Three were two embarrassed to talk to me, but the twelve year old in the yellow jacket is proud of her standard Chinese, learned in boarding school in the city. She showed me around the mountain, and rattled on about her parents, her school, and an old man she saw on TV who exercised so much that his hair turned back from grey to black.
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