Exploring the “South Capital”

Right around the Chinese New Year, also known as the Spring Festival, is the worst time to travel. Everyone travels home to their parents or travels outside of the country with their family. It’s a time of family reunions. This ad for a car demonstrates the importance of family during the celebration. Just imagine about half of the population traveling – 500,000,000 people - during the same couple of weeks. No wonder they have such a good transportation infrastructure in place. Most people get off work, and you generally get paid 3x more if you do work at this time.

From what I understand, “jing” means capital, which is why Beijing is a good name for the capital. It means “north capital." After finishing my classes, my first stop was Nanjing, which was once the capital of the republic and was also known as the “south capital.” This is where I met up with friends from the University of Warwick. Sabrina was in my program, and Guy lived in her dorm. They have since married and have been living in England the past few years. It just so happened that Guy is about to get his PhD in statistics and just moved to Hong Kong to do research related to diseases. As soon as Sabrina heard that I was going be in Shanghai, she invited me to spend the Chinese New Year with her family as long as I was ok with eating lots of food. I was in! When I arrived in Nanjing, it was a bit of the blind leading the blind. Though Sabrina grew up here, she was finishing a project before moving to Hong Kong to be with her husband. That meant Guy, who had spent little time in the city, was tasked with showing me around. Fortunately for me, I have a good sense of direction. Like in Shanghai, it was interesting to see the contrast between old and new architecture. We explored the Purple Mountain, the Linggu Temple and the City Wall of Nanjing (a 600-year-old city wall).

In all the cities there are photos and images of rabbits everywhere. It actually reminded me of Easter. The Chinese like their puns, and that partially has to do with the language. Different pronunciation or tones of a word can give it a completely different meaning. As a result, there are many homonyms. For example, the word bat and lucky are homonyms. As a result, you see a lot of images of bats in architecture. The words upside-down and arrived are homonyms, so it’s a joke to put some of the Chinese New Year signs upside-down. Fish and plenty are homonyms, so during the new year you usually make sure to leave some fish on the plate to show that you have had plenty.