Before, During, and After Departure

WELL!  As you can see, I got the photos to (finally) transfer from the iTouch to the laptop.  Good ol' technology.  It actually works sometimes when you need it to.

 Me and Ilya being ridiculous.  This is the night before leaving.

  All the foreigners had a big get-together the night before we left.  This also happens to be around the same time that Michelle and Vincent, two coworkers/friends, would be leaving China and going back home.  Bittersweet but a good night indeed.  Yep, you guessed it, this is at Starbucks.

  That fateful snowy morning at the trainstation...

 Scenes from the train ride (it was 41/2 hours long.)

  Our first hostel in Nanjing.  Pretty nifty.

 Nifty indeed.

 The view from the restaurant in the hostel in Nanjing.  Beautiful landscape architecture.

 The dining area.  There were always these two cats that would make things hilarious with their constant begging the owners for kitty food.

 The owners had a very delicate way of counting down to the spring festival with these beautiful bulbs about to bloom.

 Wine on display.

 Different parts of the hostel.

 Delicious conch meat?

 So cozy at night.

 The walk between buildings.

 These are different scenes around the technology campus we were at.

 There's the hundreds years old city wall across from the campus.

  Crossing a bridge to get to the old city on our first night.

 The entrance to the old city.

  Walking around the old city.

 Taking a break at one of the recommended coffee shops on Wikitravel.  We ended up buying a set of cards there, along with some coffee and tea and chilling there for a few hours.  The owners were really nice.

 We didn't know what this was at first. Turns out it is the entrance to the underground shopping market, which is very busy during the day time.  We checked it out the next day and there wasn't much we wanted to buy there anyway.

 Front entrance to the hostel.

 Walking from the hostel back toward the campus and then the old city.

 Our hostel toilet had an attitude.

 Cool Budha's hand on campus.

  Walking in the direction of Zhongguomen, the "gate to China", an ancient entrance.

  There it is, Zhongguomen.

  Once fortified by a complex and well planned series of walls and defenses, the gate is now the scene of a constant flow of bus, bike, car, and pedestrian traffic, a metaphor for the opening up of China.