Day 13: May 5th - So What DOES Xuzhou Have?

We went out, primarily to find out if we could get train tickets back to Wuxi, which was interesting on its own. You can't get return tickets in China, apparently. You have to arrive at your destination, and then buy tickets back to your starting point from there, and hopefully it will be sometime around convenient o'clock.

In our case, there were no tickets back to Wuxi at any time, let alone convenient times, so we got tickets to Nanjing, which is about halfway. The best part is this: They're standing tickets. At 9:30 PM. It was likely going to keep us up all night through, all while standing. We shrugged it off, and checked out of the hotel. We now only had 7 hours until the train left, so we decided on picking one attraction, and going there. Turns out Chris had a convenient list, written in Pinyin (Roman letter equivalents of Chinese characters), and in Mandarin. Thank God he had done his homework.

We took a cab ride to the museum (see: Billions of pictures), and the cab driver was really cool. He was uber chatty, and actually pointed out to us that three of our four attractions were in the same area, so that was handy to know. He also never stopped talking, trying to teach us more Mandarin along the way. Really friendly guy, and he showed us where all the locations were, too. Another bonus was that since Xuzhou is a “small town” with a mere 1.5 million, the cab was cheap too. I didn't think things could get much cheaper than Wuxi had them, but there was a big difference. In Wuxi, cabs start at 8 yuan, and in Xuzhou, they start at 5 yuan. Also, in Xuzhou, ice cream, drinks, meals, are all about half as much as in Wuxi. It makes me wonder what kind of markup they really have in Wuxi. Regardless, Wuxi is still really cheap compared to back home (it's only 3 yuan for a bottle of beer, about twice the size of one back home!).

Anyway, we went into the museum, and I took pictures of just about everything, as did Chris. Some stuff got repetitive, but there were some cool displays, like pillows made out of jade, and jade armor-like mail that the corpses wore. But if I see another random pot on display with more restorative plaster than actual historical pot, I'm going to lose it. It was funny, some of the pots would consist largely of plaster, and just have a few pieces of the actual pot in it, but they'd reconstruct in the plaster certain designs. How they knew the designs were there, when it was entirely plaster, is either a Chinese secret, or some form of piracy I don't know of.