I was sitting on the loveseat in the hotel room. It was only somewhat comfortable since I could feel the springs beneath the thin fabric of the cushion. It’s probably been sat on more than the other cushion or maybe more than one piece of luggage had been tossed upon it. In the middle of writing a blog post, my mom suddenly called my name and suggested we go to one last place. “Why couldn’t we just stay in?” I asked, “We have a long day tomorrow.”
“We’ll probably never come back,” she said and in my head, a small whisper told me, she did have a point. Despite my body’s protest, I put my shoes on and followed her onto the street. Her cousin M called a taxi, 15 minutes and about 3 KM later, we have arrived at yet another historical site – another one turned into a commercial shopping district.
As usual, we weren’t there to shop and eat. We were there to see yet another section of the Nanjing city wall. This one happened to be one of the oldest piece of the wall still standing. It was from the Ming dynasty.
At this point, I felt like I was getting the hang of photographing in China. I saw it like photographing waves at the beach. The moment one wave of people begins to slow, click, before another wave comes. Sometimes, though, it can be hard as the waves kept coming, one after another, at which point, I’ll either click the shutter button anyway or give up and move on.
The crowd deviated the moment we parted way with the shopping district. To get to the city wall, we had to go through a tunnel. The moment we came out on the other side of the tunnel, I immediately felt a shift. Before the tunnel, there were crowds, loud music playing, and people. After the tunnel, there was silence and a lot less people.
Walking along the city wall, for a moment, I felt as if I’ve been transported back to ancient times, back when there was a need for a wall to keep outsiders away, when there was a need to defend a city, when there could be a war at any moment of the day.
We didn’t go on top of the wall that day since we’ve been top of the city wall a few days ago. We continued to wander down the alleyways until my mom decided that it was dinner time, marking the end of another day and our time in China’s old capitol city of Nanjing.
