Nanjing Massacre Museum

On October 18th, we went with our friends, The Lee's (Chad, Sara, and Clara), and visited the Nanjing Massacre museum. Here is a little history about it from my friend Sara's blog, hopefully she doesn't mind, but she described it so well.

This museum was built to commemorate and tell the tales of the gruesome Japanese attack of Nanjing, just prior to WWII. Knowing the Japanese were coming, the Chinese government told the Nanjing people to stay and fight, locked them in their city, and abandoned them. 1,000s of Chinese people died from being trampled, suffocated, or burned trying to follow the army through a tunnel leading to the last unlocked portion of the city gates. In about 6 weeks time, 300,000 Nanjing citizens and soldiers were mass or individually killed after being brutally raped/tortured by Japanese militia.

This memorial really made me reflect and be grateful to be born in a nation where we have so many freedoms. It was very humbling experience to see what others throughout the world have gone through.

Outside the museum they had a of sculptures, this is one of a woman holding her dead child

This bell had a lot of symbolism to it. Because there were 300,000(give or take) Chinese civilians killed, the number 300,000 appears all over the entire monument. It is written in every imaginable language in several places, and the number is also written randomly on walls, doorways, rocks, and other objects. This bell has three towers, representing the "3", and has five rings at the top, representing the five zeroes. Add those together and you get "300,000". The lines connecting the three towers(the bell his hanging from the middle of them) is a representation of the character for "people", and it is placed perpendicular to the ground, to represent falling. So the bell(which has "peace" written on it) represents the 300,000 fallen chinese people. At the start of the memorial

This symbolizes being buried alive

A walkway with people's footprints who had survived the massacre. It was built in the late 90's I believe, or roughly 50 years later. Several of the footprints were obviously "bound".

Names of people that they have identified that were killed

This area was the "graveyard". This land was literally a mass grave, and since most of the people buried here are unidentified, they decided it best not to excavate all the bodies.

This is a room where they have found many remains. Again, they started to excavate, but after failing to identify any of the bodies, they decided to leave the excavation site as it was, and protect it in this museum.

One of the many bodies they have excavated.Memorial to pay tribute to those who were killed
Statue at the end that statue symbolizes peace and hope

So at the end of the museum you go out into a courtyard. Sara, Clara and I were walking around and showing Clara the grass (you don't see much of it here). When we got over to the grass we noticed a bone lying there. I thought it looked like a human femur bone. Since this place has thousands of bodies buried here, I didn't think it was that crazy of a thought. Plus there were a lot of new trees planted and thought hey when they were digging for those they probably found a bone and just threw it aside. So we went and told Chad and Jake, and Chad went and got one of the security guards. He of course picked it right up and said that it was most likely a cow bone.....who knows though.

A Grocery Store w/ American Products

Well since I have moved to China, I have missed a few...ok maybe a lot of American things. One of the things I don't understand is why they don't sell Clorox wipes. My friend Sara laughs at me because, I talk about them constantly. I just don't understand with so many unsanitary things why they wouldn't want Clorox wipes to help with the problem. Well last weekend a lady from our church told us about a store that sells American items. I thought it was a store far away, but it ended up being right down the street from Jake's school. It is called Times Grocery Store, when I walked in I wanted to cry. It had marshmallows, Mexican food, cereal, and yes CLOROX wipes. They were 91 quai (about 13 dollars), but it was worth the money. I came home and cleaned our house thoroughly, wiping down the bathroom, floor, sinks, table, etc... While we were there, we found tortillas and cheese. Jake also found Dr. Pepper, which he decided that if he knew they sold that, he would have been going there daily during school.

Well on Sunday, we decided to try and make cheese quesadillas. We didn't really have a frying pan, so we used this pot. I left the tortilla for about 10 seconds and realized a nasty burning smell coming from the stove. So we ended up burning our tortillas, burning the Spanish rice (it wasn't at all edible), but we took Elder Wirthlin's advice and just laughed at the whole experience. So our costly spurge at the grocery store wasn't as great as we imagined after trying to cook the food here:)

Jake's Favorite Restaurant

Well anytime anyone mentions this restaurant...Jake's mouth starts watering and he wants to go. It is a Nepalese/Indian restaurant. We walked in went upstairs and then took our shoes off and sat on the floor. I didn't understand why we couldn't sit at one of the tables with chairs...I guess it was to have the "full" experience. It was fun, and I had a tasty chocolate milkshake. The Nan bread was delicious and so was the chicken that I got. They are known for their curry, unfortunately last Spring, I had the flu really bad, and we ate curry the night before it hit, and I just haven't been able to eat it since then. So Jake loved the curry and I tried some, but I'm not ready for that yet:) It was a fun night and we had something else besides Chinese Food!