Nanjing is a city I do like here in China as it's not flat and all grey looking :-)
I came here for 3 nights, mainly to catch up with another friend who was teaching a Summer camp. Once I had booked into the hotel, I went in search of my friend, but found him just coming out of the elevator. After the normal greetings of "What's Up?" and with my answer of "The ceiling!" we caught up a bit on our latest happenings and went in search of more food.
It was very hot in Nanjing and while I was there, I never saw it get below 36 C during the day, with the nights hanging around 30 C and complete with a hot wind. So, I didn't venture out a lot, only for food.
My mate informed me the hotel was c..p, as always with these summer camps :-) then he informed me the air conditioner turns itself off every now and then and you have to wait 10 mins, if you're lucky before turing it on again. Now this is not good during the night and you wake up hot and bothered, then can't go back to sleep again. Thankfully this only happened to me once while there. Other than that, my time in Nanjing was enjoyable and nothing really to write home about, except for when I left there yesterday for my next leg of the journey.....to the big capital......Beijing :-)
My flight was due to leave at 2:45 pm and arrive in Beijing at 4:35 pm. I thought this would be good timing and with luck I would miss the peak hour traffic. I nearly missed everything, more so my hotel booking as they couldn't speak English and my Chinlish is outstanding, needless to say my Chinese is barely zilch!
My flight was delayed and there was no reason given and there was also nowhere to sit as the flights before mine, all 4 of them were also delayed. After standing and waiting for about an hour, there was movement, so I rushed over and got a seat :-) One sure needs to be quick here in China to get a seat anywhere :-)
Finally a girl appeared out of nowhere with a megaphone and I know from experience that when a Chinese citizen has one of these in their hand, it could only mean one thing.....an announcement was going to be made and finally I might learn something. Wrong! She made the announcement in Chinese only and more than half of the hoard got up and moved, meanwhile I waited and waited and waited and was still waiting for the English announcement for 5 minutes and finally went up to her and asked what's going on? She couldn't speak english! Another worker informed me what was happening and said it was not for my flight, so I sat again and continued on waiting.
At 4:30 we boarded the plane finally and still sat there for another hour before taking off. I was informed that a storm was terrorising Beijing and is why all flights were delayed, in and out of Beijing. The seat in front of me was broken and I thought "thank goodness I didn't get that one". Time to eat while we waited to depart the scene at the airport. I was feeling a little peckish as I hadn't had anything to eat since breakfast. I undid the latch for my tray and it landed in my lap! By this time I was in no mood for anything else to go wrong. The air stewardess looked in surprise when they saw it and laughed. Later I was moved up to First class, where I might add, the seats were in top form :-)
By the time I reached my hotel it was nearly 9pm and I was absolutely beat and didn't want to do anything. Farr met me at the hotel and helped me with my gear and we decided to go out and have Beijing Duck tomorrow night, which is now tonight. Just thinking about it is making me hungry right now.
Tomorrow is another day, so heres hoping all will begin to go well again.....stay tuned.
