Nanjing Presidential Palace

May 9, 2007 Wednesday

Started our day right with another trip to Starbucks. It started to rain, so the next thing on the agenda was to buy umbrellas. (Do you notice a theme in my blogs? I spent most of the trip to Warsaw and Budapest looking for umbrellas. Then after I found one, it never rained again. That was the one that broke in Shanghai.)

This time it was much easier. We found 2 right away in the department store. Mine is green and Chuck’s is beige with flowers.

M & P had said that we should go to the Presidential palace. It wasn’t in either of the guide books, but they were right. It is huge and very interesting. It has a whole section on the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom history and then another whole section about the beginning of the Kuomintang. Plus some great gardens.

A stone boat in the garden.

Many meeting rooms and pictures of the people who came to China for meetings. (4 flights)
I loved this. Being the incredibly bad speller that I am, I can appreciate spelling it two different ways and still being wrong. (Recyciabie & Non-recycldble)

There were many little restaurants just down the street from the Presidential palace museum. We chose the Tea Station. Chuck had lasagna & I had a beef, bell peppers & onions with lots of black pepper spaghetti. Who knew that it was going to serve Italian food?

We have driven by this building several times. It is the Nanjing library.

In the afternoon we went to the Taiping Museum. It showed the history of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom rebellion in the late 1800’s. The philosophy of this group was a combination of Christianity and communism. (1 flight)

Ming had written down the instructions for where we were to meet him for dinner. Douglas had sent the update info for the phone, so I planned to have Ming add the minutes when we met him. We were supposed to meet between 6 and 6:30. A problem – it was getting close to 6:30 and no Ming. I went into a shop and asked if anyone spoke English. 2 girls pointed at the 3^rd. She was horrified & said “Shop English”. I showed her the phone, punched in the card access number and then when she listen, the comprehension suddenly came. She obviously explained to the others, because they all chanted the password numbers that she needed to punch in.

I have a working phone again, so I called Ming. He said that he was almost there. (He tried for 20 minutes to get a taxi.) After about 5 minutes he called me. “Where are you?” “Under the big gate.” “No, I’m under the big gate and you aren’t here. Give your phone to someone so I can ask them which big gate you are under.”

I gave the phone to a young man passing by. He chatted for a few minutes and handed it back and said, “Wait here, he comes for you.”

It turns out that this place has 5 gates, north, south, east & west and CENTER. He wanted us at the center, but the cab had just heaved us out at the North. Cell phones are fabulous for these kinds of things – even when you have to get strangers to help you out.

His restaurant has a fixed menu of many many many small dishes. It changes with the seasons. We think that there were 25 different things, but we really aren’t sure. He said that because there are so many tastes, if you don’t like one, you just put it aside. For cold dishes, we had corn on the cob, Nanjing duck, scallions, ham, and edename. Then came the hot - lima beans, chicken, little crayfish, shredded tofu, lentils, puff pastry on a scallop shell with a scallop inside, one steamed vegetable bao in a baby steamer, pot stickers, 3 kinds of soup, tofu with nuts, and potato pancake. The waitress explained that one of the steamers had a tomato under it, and that person received a prize. I won. It was a little red box with 2 polished stones.

There was also an egg on a divided dish. The egg was on one side and on the other salt, pepper and a small straw. This was strange, so I asked Ming about the straw. He explained that there was a baby chicken inside the egg, but he didn’t eat these. Both Chuck and I decided that we didn’t eat them either. (If he had been willing to demonstrate the correct technique – I might have given it a try.)

I almost forgot the sweet. There was the red bean and rice sweet gruel, and black sweet rice, and watermelon. (1 flight.)

The area that this restaurant is in has boat rides on the canal, and lots of bright lights after dark. It also has rikshaw pullers dressed in yellow silk costumes. We walked around awhile before getting the taxi back to the hotel.

(6 flights today)