We did a little bit more sightseeing in Beijing before dashing to the airport for an internal flight to Nanjing.
18th – Beijing to Nanjing – went to Lama Temple & briefly Confuzi Temple. Then on to airport for flight to Nanjing*…
*amazing business moving us from Gate 16 to Gate 19 & then back across the tarmac
I remember the business at the airport, because we were solemnly told we needed to relocate to another gate in order to be in close proximity to our plane, then ended up wandering rather haphazardly across the tarmac to our plane, which was close to the original gate. Frankly that was one of my lesser health and safety concerns about the internal flights back then – more on that topic anon.
…straight on to coaches for trip to amazing bird market and then on to hotel – 5-star Jinling Hotel.
As yes, the bird market.
Janie and I found it fascinating and I’m sure these days Janie would have taken dozens and dozens of photographs there. Still, enough above to give you an idea. Some of our fellow tourists found the place unsettling; it certainly didn’t smell like a place where you’d want to try the street food. It’s probably highly regulated and much safer hygeine-wise now.
As for the 5-star Jinling Hotel – so famous and having had so many high-falutin’ guests it gets a Wikipedia entry – it was a strange sort of 5-star. My guess is that there were different grades of room and our tour group was in last grade:
My memory had Janie’s hairdryer debacle happening in this hotel, but my notes have now sent me to the Holiday Inn Beijing for the electrical debacle and I now recall that the incident occurred before our peking duck dinner, not before the music concert, so I have moved that anecdote to the previous day’s write up – click here or below:
What the “awards” notes do remind me is that the elevators in the Jinling Hotel were somewhat below five star standard. I awarded that hotel:
The London Regional Transport Efficient Elevator Service Award
On reflection, I think our departures from that hotel were always delayed by people unable to lifts get down from their rooms.
Dinner in town – not bad meal – good ribs. Music concert at which we didn’t fall asleep (but almost everyone else did).
So that will have been our very first encounter with Chinese traditional instruments, including the pipa – an instrument that has fascinated us since and which Janie has subsequently likened to a theorbo with predictably hilarious results in the early music world:
William Carter, Theorbist Extraordinaire’s Mystery Punter Outed, 24 September 2010
But I digress.
All the photos we took on that day – by which I mean all 18 photos – can be seen in raw form in the Flickr album below:
