Confucious Temple

With the rides nailed we then headed out and to the hotel. It's a tall structure next to the main train station, which meant there was the ambient noise of car horns, bus horns and bike horns to keep us awake through the night. I hadn't been sleeping at all well due in part to the ambience and also from beginning to dehydrate from the heat. I was drinking loads of water but clearly not enough!

Nanjing's main train station.

In the evening we headed down into the main tourist area by taxi (ripped off by a couple of pounds, big deal to the driver, not to us) By tourist I meant Chinese tourists from the rest of the country who'd come here to see the Confucious Temple, a lovely building in the centre of the city.

The original "Pull My Finger" statue. Supposedly doing so brings good luck.

There is a little section in amongst the shops that has pets for sale with the animals in pretty poor conditions. None of the usuals seemed to find this as unacceptable as we did. A different in sensibilities unfortunately.

Nice!

The main shopping street full of a mixture of Western imports and local chains.

There are a lot of these guys around the temple. Be warned that if you do decide to go for a ride you'll have to endure the constant ringing of finger bells that the guys play incessantly.

The Confucius Temple, the centre point of the tourism here. It's not the main shrine, that's in Shenlong. There are a number of shrines around the country and this is the one here.

In honour of the main himself I thought I'd do a bit of digging around to find some deep and profound quotes that I could post here and after a bit of searching I found this one...

"Never give a sword to a man who can't dance"

We had gone looking for vendors selling food on sticks but didn't find any and the restaurants we could find either looked too imposing and unwelcoming to us or smelt terrible. So we left the area and went for a wander to see what we could find.