It’s Saturday afternoon in Nanjing, the pre-Mao capital of China, and here’s another brief, raw, update from the road.

A snapshot of a rural area in Fuyang

Tex and I just finished a 2 hour walkthrough of the Nanjing Massacre Museum.  In terms of layout and information, it was probably the best museum I have ever seen in the Middle Kingdom.  It did come with the typical Chinese propaganda to ensure that viewers believed 100% in the facts which were already plainly obvious from all the images and artifacts (not to mention general worldwide historical consensus), but that’s a topic for a later post.

Before arriving in Nanjing this morning, Tex and I spent the past two days wandering around Northwestern Anhui, one of the poorest regions of the PRC.  Our goal for this trip was to experience locales which had nothing extraordinary about them, thus no tourism industry, and very little contact with outsiders. Our first day was spent wandering around Fuyang, the poorest (in terms of per capita GDP) city in Anhui.  Fuyang was surprisingly much larger than we had anticipated, but indeed quite economically disadvantaged.  The locals were quite friendly to us, but absolutely baffled at why we would ever come to Fuyang, with most thinking we were either secret businessmen, journalists, spies or some combination of the three.  One interesting little catch to Fuyang is that it is virtually impossible to find a restaurant with a menu.  Instead, sit-down restaurants consist mostly of ramshackle little abodes where you simply pick foodstuffs out of a refrigerator, tell the cook how to make it, and then get quoted a price.  There was however, an absolute cornicopia of street food, which is mainly what we subsisted upon.  But I’ll save more elaboration for Fuyang until I get back to the US, and have more time to write.

From Fuyang, we traveled to a small town （县城）called Tianhe, where the locals were equally baffled at these two strange tall (I am 6′1 and Tex is 6′5) white men who had descended on their humble town.  Like Fuyang, Tianhe was much larger than we had anticipated as well, containing by our estimates, at least 100,000 residents.  We spent the day scowering the town on foot, consuming local snacks, and chatting with the locals, many of whom had never before seen a foreigner.  At one point, when we happened to pass by an elementary school gate around lunch time, we were accosted by a mob of eager sixth graders watching us eat street food.  After one of them pulled out his notebook and a pen and asked us to sign it, the others followed suit, and we spent close to half an hour signing autographs.  It was difficult to go anywhere without making a scene.

I’ve taken several hundred pictures on this trip, and learned a lot about life in the Central Chinese Plain, which I’ll be sure to write up once I get back to the US.  We plan to spend 2 or 3 days here in Nanjing, and time permitting, may head out to a 县城 in Jiangsu (one of China’s richer provinces) to experience the contrast between small town life in Anhui and Jiangsu.  Until then, I’ll try to keep up with the quick updates.      

See the article in its original form at Ben’s Blog…..小本的博客

Warning：The use of any news and articles published on eChinacities.com without written permission from eChinacities.com constitutes copyright infringement, and legal action can be taken.