Sigh. I’m tired. I juts got back from my two day vacation in Nanjing. It was fun. =] I took like, 446 pictures. I am now our family’s official camera person. I feel special. =]

Anyhow. I’ve just realized how crappy chapters 1 and 2 of DMA are, and I’m going to go need to edit some more… but I’ve already (I think) finished editing chapter 3, unless other people have suggestions. So yeah.

Back to the vacation. It’s so long, I’ll bet no one’s gonna read the whole thing. But ah well. =]

Wednesday morning, I woke up at 6:00 to the unpleasant sound of my mom hammering on my bedroom door. “GET UP!” she said, even though I was already awake. So I got up.

I hurriedly gathered up the last few things I would have to jam in my backpack for the trip, and realized I had forgotten to charge my iPod. So I let it charge for about… 5 minutes, until my mom shouted at me to get away from the computer. I had been trying to quickly edit chapter 3 of DMA to get it up early, but no avail. I went back downstairs to quickly stuff a dumpling in my mouth, and polished it off in about 2 minutes. We then did a final check of items to bring, and headed out the door to my dad’s car.

It was freezing. It took a while to have my dad drive us to the train station. My brother insisted on letting him share my iPod.

We got to the train station, said a goodbye to my dad, and hurriedly walked to the gates to talk to the train people. Only to find out that… we were at the WRONG TRAIN STATION. The managers there told us to take the subway to the “old train station”, so… we did, obviously. I had to stand up on the subway train for eight stops, and then someone finally got up, allowing me to sit. After about eleven stops, we arrived at the RIGHT train station.

We stuck our luggage in one of those coolio conveyer belt thingies to be checked, and then went to the waitin room, to find that everyone had already boarded the train. Well, that wasn’t good. So we ran… and made it to the train. Yay. My Jamie and I sat across from two… weird men. And my mom sat with three other elderly people. But then they left at one of the stops, so Jamie and I switched over to where my mom was sitting.

So. Um. On the train… let’s see… I actually Wow Power Leveling  forget what I was doing. But after we switched to sit next to our mom, I remembered we had brought Jamie’s DS. So I played it. I am now addicted to Pokemon Diamond.XD

Anyways. The train ride was pretty boring… two and a half hours long. We finally got off the train at Nanjing, and went down to where the taxis were waiting to pick people up. There, we were bombarded by tons of people asking if we wanted to join their tourist group. One man came up to us, and when he left, another immediately came up… my mom shook him off. Another elderly lady immediately ran over, and stuck to my mom like a wart for about seven minutes. Jamie swore at her. In English, obviously. This happened continually.

My mom couldn’t find the tourist group she had arranged to meet before we got there, so we just joined with the first man.

We got onto the tourist bus, went somewhere to pick someone else up, and then we went to Cao Tian Gong, which, translated to the best of my pitiful ablities, is “Palace Facing the Sky”. Or something like that. It was a history museumish place. Too bad: history bores me. Especially when all the captions are in Chinese, and I can’t read them.

Anyway, there were these statues of historical people… a supposed “Elixer of Life”, chamber pots, and… cracked bowls and stuff like that. Outside, there was also a gold emperor’s chair. T’was cool.

Next… we went to… um… er… where’d we go? Let me check the photos to get an idea. Oh right. We went to this nature park-ish place called (again, translated to the best of my pitiful ablilites) Rain Flower Stage [雨花台]. It was pretty cool. There was this rock building where we learned about… rocks. Now, there’s something you should know. Nanjing is like, famous for its rocks. Anyway. There was this old dude who talked to us about living rocks and dead rocks - how if you put living rocks in water, they’ll change color. And how dead rocks… are… dead. Living rocks are shiny. *.*

In the shop thingy, my we bought a set of 20 living rocks. They’re shiny. We also saw I large crystal ball with red swirls. It was cool.

Oh yeah… at the entrance of the Rain Flower place, there were Wow Gold  these big bushes cut really neatly into the words 雨花台. It was PREETEH.

Next… we went to… this… temple place. It was… interesting. There was this painted word from long ago - 虎, meaning tiger. We weren’t supposed to take pictures. -___-

And… there were more historical stuffs. And all these purdyful blowup decorations for the olympics. And the new year. And the Buddha dude. Ho hum. There was also this… chamber pot filled with water that was swirling mechanically, with a bunch of plastic lilies in it, rotating slowly. It also had GOLDFISHEZ. Pretty cool. Then we went to this market place… beside it, there was a temple that had two HUGE LONG gold dragons stuck on it. People were rowboating in the lake next to it too. =]

Then… ugh. Another temple. This one contained like, tons of Buddha worshipping rooms. BO-RING. Before we get to that… our tour guide was this place was a skinny guy in his twenties, I’d say. He seemed very passionate about Buddhism. -__-

The places we went to all had these incense pots… with really long and thick incense sticks. I was being choked by the fumes. It made me really lightheaded. Some Wow Gold of the incense sticks were on fire too, like a burning camp. Aren’t temples supposed to be peaceful?

Anyways. We entered the temple, and saw this HUGE gold statue of the Buddha dude. He was really… overweight with large, really long drooping ears that looked like hair, although according to the tourguide, that’s how the Buddha is always portrayed. He had a really ornate altar, but unfortunately, we weren’t allowed to take pictures. =[ Anyway. Aside from the giant Buddha, there were fake, cloth flowers of every color, embroidered with gold edging, standing in ornate, china vases. There were lots of incense sticks, and at the foot of the altar, a large, wooden box for donations. On either side of the altar, there were large, red, mountainish structures with little caves in neat rows. In each “cave”, there was a small, lit up candle of the Buddha, all the candles identical. And more decorative stuff, but anyways, it was pretty beautiful, even if you don’t believe in the Buddha.

On the other side, there was… another gold Buddha statue. This one was standing erect with armor and a giant sword thingy. What could be a rather intimidating picture was ruined by the look on the Buddha’s face, a look of… joy and childlishness? Hmm.

The tour guide dude was teaching us how to bow down to the Buddha. My family, being Christian, went outside instead, being bored. Overwhelmed by another whiff of incense smoke. Yuck.

Um. So. After that… MOUNTAIN CLIMBING! MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAAAA!

Excuse me.

Only seven of us tourist people went, including me and Jamie, excluding my mom. =/

The mountain, if you can call it a mountain… was… pathetic. The first part was a steady uphill walk, for about half a mile or so. Then, the STAIRS. Unless Jamie is mistaken, there were 384 steps that we climbed. It was pretty easy. When we got to the top, Jamie went to the bathroom, and I took some pictures of the view up there, which was pretty awesome. You could see the other mountains, and the whole city. Covered in foggishness. AWESOMENESS. Then Jamie came back from the bathroom, so we went on. We looked to the left. No path. To the right World of Warcraft Gold. No path. Oh wait. I lied. It was the right first, THEN the left. My bad. =]

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