YANGZHOU: DAY 2

Our second day in Yangzhou involved less time spent on the tour buses and more spent playing around. Good thing too, as a fair few of my classmates were nursing hangovers, if not from alcohol than from nearly ingesting poop.

Our first stop was the Wudaotai Mansion (误道台宅第), a sprawling, walled-in residence many centuries old. Our group, having already had its numbers by those who had decided to sleep in and explore the city on their own, evidenced even less interest than the day before in the barking tour guide, and more interest in looking at whatever caught their eye, regardless of its cultural or historical relevance. Personally, I rather liked the goldfish pond,

an altar to my girl Kuan Yin:

and all the wall hanging composed of slabs of rock with patterns that resembled Chinese landscape paintings:

My classmates continued on their campaign to terrorize Chinese children,

and the teachers continued their campaign of posing cutely.

After a reasonably good lunch of local specialties we were delivered to the He Garden (何园) and given a couple of hours to roam around and enjoy the flowers, the rocks, and all the strange little doorways, dead-ends, and corridors.

My classmate Ryan doing some sort of rock climbing/yoga hybrid. He actually hung out like that for a while.

Later, as a few of us were resting on some rocks and chatting about socialist states, a young girl and her grandfather passed by, the grandfather indicating us and explaining: "Those people are foreigners; everything they say we can't understand, everything we say they can't understand." We were all so stunned at the lesson of the futility cross-cultural communication that none of us had a chance to correct him.

Graffiti etched into bamboo:

During the last part of the day we were unleashed into the center of the city, modern in most every way, save for some ancient pagodas in the middle of traffic circles and these tranquil old canals.

I joined a few similarly aimless classmates for some urban explorations. I remember we discussed finding a snack street that we had heard about, and that the possibility of getting neck massages/head washes was raised, but all other options were nixed once when we found the local amusement park/arcade.

I sucked at everything but air hockey but enjoyed watching the boys draw crowds around them as they played the tyco drums or shoot-em-ups. My classmate Chris pointed out this little boy standing on top of a basketball game, while his grandfather shot baskets from the side, noting that it summed up a whole lot about modern-day China.

Outside the arcade there were some really cool activities for kids, including this inflatable floating gerbil wheel:

and these miniature paddle boats:

It was with much gleeful excitement that I spotted yet another game of bumper cars near the carousel. There were four of us, Chris, Ryan, Ned and myself, and we each got our own car, aiming for nothing less than total 碰碰车domination.

I performed pretty well, having done some warming-up the day before, but the most impressive crash of the day came when a car containing two little Chinese girls aged about 7 and 5 rear-ended me with a dramatic jolt that caused my ass to leave my seat for a few brief seconds. The crowd of curious onlookers, bored parents, and people waiting in line was quite obviously delighted by the spectacle.