Nanjing: a short time in a cool city

11-8
I got to Nanjing late in the evening. I took a D train, which is one of the newer higher tech trains that go real fast.  It got up to 260 Km/h.  It was way fancy.  It was Star Trek Enterprise fancy.  And it was so convenient that the train station it arrived at it Nanjing was connected to the metro line.  Like you would think this would be common in other cities but it hasn't been.  And then things in Nanjing just got better:  an automatic train ticket dispensing machine.   Getting train tickets has been real painful up until now.  Wow, I love Nanjing!
Keeping with the "love Nanjing" mood, the hostel was really easy to get to.  It was kinda small but cute.  The staff was friendly when I arrived there, and offered me a free cup of coffee.  Then I went to some Chinese fast food place across the street for dinner.  I got Baozi, Jaozi, and soup.  I felt like I had ordered too much stuff, but eating it all was easy.  The chefs got a kick out of the spectacle.
I hung out in the bar in the hostel.  I couldn't recognize their wifi network though, which made booking my hostel in Shanghai difficult.  So i tried another network, but it was protected, "ah crap. I dunno. 1234567890?" It worked. Oops. I couldn't believe it.  I owe myself a super spy sticker.

11-9
One full day in Nanjing so I did the most touristy thing:  The Purple Mountain Park.  I thought I would just hike up the mountain, and then maybe visit some of the random touristy stuff around there, which I hadn't completely read up on, but while I was in the lobby of the hostel I kinda encountered this Chinese guy who was also a tourist, and I could tell he was asking about the Purple Mountain too.  His English was terrible, but we figured out how to agree to travel there together.  He was a Chef from Beijing.  He and I spent the day together and we communicated through our dictionaries.  It actually worked ok, and I ended up learning a lot of Mandarin along the way.
We saw a lot of stuff too--and if not for this guy, I probably wouldn't have managed so well.  First we went to the Sun Yatsen Mausoleum.  Sun Yatsen was the guy who brought about the short lived "Republic of China", so he must have been cool.  The guy I was with kept saying stuff like "Communism bad, Sun Yatsen good".  It was a real emotioal experience for him.

After the Mausoleum we went to a cultural museum.  It had some cool bugs in it.  Next we walked around some wall stuff, and maybe there were dead people buried there. Then we visited a Lake and met the Chinese equivalent of the polar beer club--maybe the Panda Bear club?  After that hit up this really tall tower with a ridiculously windy staircase .  Finally we ended it with a temple.

a wax sculpture.  Notice how ugly they make the white guy.