Scenes from Nanjing's Xuanwu Lake Park

    

     Performance writing?  A story?  Poem? Opinion?  To whom it may concern?  This was one of those times when I wished that I could read Mandarin.  Just inside the gate we saw several sidewalk calligraphers like this one, writing with a pointed sponge on a stick.  Some used an upside-down soda bottle taped above the sponge for a slow drip, so they didn't need to re-dip their pen in a bucket.

     Here's something worth exporting to the U.S.  If guerilla graffiti-ists in the U.S.  could be convinced to ditch their spray paint and do their thing in public, in daylight, with water like these calligraphers, they'd maybe get more of the attention they crave--evaporating water, ephemeral art...a sort of scarcity creating demand.  Each of the sidewalk calligraphers had an interested audience, even a couple of illiterates who came from afar.

     Another city, another morning, another group of groovin' young-at-heart women on a plaza doing their synchronized dances to a CD playing on a boombox somewhere nearby. It's exercise.  It's social.  They're having fun.
     I had fun watching this woman.  She was dressed up, made up, and seemed to enjoy being out front.  Still she seemed self-absorbed, a little of that single-minded focus again.

Further on we were treated to some live music on traditional instruments.  This group of girls was rehearsing under what looked like their mothers' direction.  The girl on the far left created some rather pleasing music on her pipes.  The girl on the right...well, maybe we just didn't stay long enough to appreciate how beautiful that tinny horn could sound once its player got warmed up.

    

     This was an especially pretty part of the walk for someone like me who likes evergreens. The Ming city wall was to our right, just as it was the whole time we walked in the park.  We were headed toward Zijin Shan, "Purple-Gold Mountain", which is in the center background.

     Zijin Mountain is a much-visited area in Nanjing.  Among the sites of interest there are the Sun Yatsen Mauseleum, a 14th-centruy Ming emperor's tomb, botanical gardens and an observatory.

     Here's an enterprising fellow with two  China-sized bags of some kind of extruded snack that he was scooping out and selling in much smaller bags to Sunday walkers who were making the trek up Zijin.  

     We walked only as far as the cable car that went to the top of the mountain.  Maybe if we'd bought a bag of this stuff to eat we'd have been able to walk faster so we'd have had time to walk up the path that runs under the cable car to the top.  As it was, our time for exploring was running out and we needed to head back down.

     We stopped and bought a couple of warm sweet potatoes from this vendor, and then nipped into a small grocery store a little further on for a can of Japanese mackerel.  That made a Kathy-and-Terry-style fast food lunch back in our hotel room, before we set out for the train station to go back to Shanghai.

     We didn't have enough time in Nanjing, but the bullet train should make it easy enough to return someday.