Wheeee!

Nanjing pictoral: surfaces

When I lived in Beijing my very talented friend with the hippiest name ever (Oak Taylor Smith) did this photo series called Numbers that documented Beijing's fight against xiao guang gao (grafitti like advertisments that are illegally painted onto surfaces consisting of a phone number and a simple description of the type of service offered - water, visas, etc). For years, these ad scrawls covered Beijing's walls, sidewalks and even telphone poles until the summer before the Olympics when the Beijing government began an aggressive campaign to paint over all of them.

Soon a pattern emerged where someone would post their xiao guang gao, the goverment would then paint over it , someone else scrawls their ad on the newly blank surface, the goverment paints over that and so on. Typical to China, the paint used to cover the ads were always a different color; however, atypical to China, rather than looking like crap, this actulaly created an unexpectedly lovely layered effect when photographed at close range. Street Rothko!

Ever since I saw Oak's photos, I've been fastidiously taking my own surface pictures. Below are a few near the front gate of Nanjing Normal University (insert clever joke about what Nanjing Abnormal University might be like):

Nanjing pictoral: night scenes

The first night we arrived in the city we herded over to Nanjing's historic Confucious Temple. Back in day, scores of aristocrataic hopefuls would come to this destination to to take the imperial examinations in an effort to gain admittance into the emperor's entourage of advisors and ambassadors. Nowadays, this once august landmark is surrounded by a warren-like maze cluttered with small shops selling kitch, tat and food on sticks. It's glittery, its crowded, it's neon-riffic.

Nanjing pictoral: the things we ate

Other than apparently being known for being the Bible printing capital of the world and the place where the Japanese plowed down over 100,000 people in the period of three months (eek!), Nanjing is also known for its amazing food (yum!). With roads constantly lined with sprawling plane trees and small vendors selling steamers full of delicious street buns and pastries, we walked and ate our way through the city over the long weekend.

Candied fruit kebabs

Roadside scallion pancakes

Candy art man and groupies

The lost art of cotton candy pulling

Nanjing pictoral: trains, incense, mountains and massacres

Sometimes with my job I feel like I'm having the boarding school experience I never had when I was actually in high school. We spend the majority of our lives in the same place, 95% of my social interactions outside the office involve at least two or more work friends and if I organize any gathering without inviting the whole "gang" someone gets inevitably upset and sends passive aggressive texts/emails to me for the next week. How old are we again?

Two weekends ago, a herd of my work friends and I took a train trip up to Nanjing for the Tomb Sweeping Holidays. We didn't sweep any tombs but we did burn incense at a temple where buddahs were carved into the rock face, hiked up a mountain to see Sun Yat Sen's mausoleum and the Ming Tombs, and visited to the Nanjing massacre museum so I suppose we paid our respects to the dead in one form or another.