Worst Kept Secrets

Today was one of the first nice days of Real Spring (we had Fake Spring last month), and so we decided to get out on the scooter and go see something new after recovering from Saturday night, which was largely spent drowning in a bottle of whiskey. We were planning to head down to Mochou Lake, but along the way passed a Ming-y looking building with a lot of people outside. We decided to see what was going on there, and it wound up being maybe my favorite Nanjing attraction I’ve seen so far.

Don’t get me wrong, Purple Mountain and Fuzi Miao are fun, and worth seeing, but Chaotian Palace was really, really cool. Outside the entrance gate there was a court yard where street vendors were selling baked sweet potatoes, old men were chatting with their bird cages and mah-jongg sets, and kids were playing on the ramps along the staircases, which were slick enough to function as slides. I really love the little pockets of old men who bring their pet birds in their little bamboo bird cages with china food pots out to enjoy the sunshine - the only people I ever see doing it are older and male, and there’s something really sweet about it.

Right outside the palace gate, though, there was an AWESOME antiques market. I really enjoy Fuzi Miao, which is a labryrinthine market of fantastically cheap and occasionally supremely awesome souvenirs, but this market was infinitely cooler, if smaller. There were stacks of calligraphy scrolls, dusty opium pipes, baskets of old coins, stamp books, assorted Mao memorabilia, antique clocks (including some really awesome and really old antique varieties that involved rolling ball bearings), chipped statues of people and monsters missing heads, claws, tails, or digits, jade pieces, and various mysterious objects. Chris said that it was definitely the place to go to buy a mogwai, and I’m sure we would have found one if we’d sifted through a little deeper. And the highlight of my day was probably when we passed a guy with a parrot who was chirping “ni hao!” over and over again. I mean, of COURSE a parrot in China says “ni hao,” but it was still funny and strange.

After we watched a man feed his pet birds attached to his bicycle handlebars by little pieces of string and bought some fantastic pseudo-comic book 1950s (I guess?) prints, we paid the twenty-five yuan admission fee for the palace complex itself, and wandered through. It houses the Nanjing City Museum, which is definitely worth seeing - there are various archeological artifacts (bear in mind that this city is OLD - 495 BCish), including pottery, art, story scrolls, weapons, tools, brushes, skulls, and replicas of kilns and transport, complete with diagrams. My favorite thing we saw was a little diarama of clay figures, including a dentist yanking out someone’s tooth, a carpenter with a cat twined around his legs playing with the wood shavings, a barber shaving a client’s head, a fat rich man being pulled by exhausted peasants in a rickshaw, a toy maker carving a wooden cat with wheels, a butcher slaughtering a chicken, and a bespectacled scholar going through his books. There were a lot of English signs and placards, too, which was nice - a lot of the time I get really overwhelmed at historical sites, just because I have absolutely no idea what I’m looking at, but this museum was relatively clear (plenty of WTF stuff, too, though).

We walked through two museum buildings, but didn’t make it to the art gallery in time. There was some incredibly important-looking building that was being renovated, and we wandered around its exterior, which like every outdoor Chinese tourist attraction I’ve seen was full of winding paths, stone stairs, dilapidated buildings with broken glass, concrete pools, and surprise gardens. It was a really, really, really nice place to spend an afternoon, and didn’t require half the energy you need for Purple Mountain or the thick skin that you need for Fuzi Miao. The antiques market, especially, was remarkably free of people tugging at us or shouting “HELLO!”

Finally, when we were leaving, a little black frog dog came up to say hello, and its owner followed, beaming at us. She wound up pushing Chris off his scooter so she could demonstrate how well-behaved the little guy was. As soon as she sat down and gestured, he hopped right up with her (I stayed on the back of the scooter, just in case this incredibly friendly lady was actually a scooter thief, leading to hilarious pictures).

*As usual, at least 50% of the photographic credit goes to Chris, who is sitting right next to me writing a blog post about exactly the same thing… If you haven’t already, go look at his new layout - looks NICE!

**And I’m sorry about the sloppy photo alignment - wordpress is being wonky, and I’m too tired to mess with it right now.