A Beautiful Day....A Beautiful Place

What a beautiful day...Nanjing is a city of 6 million, and we were here to visit with faculty and students at the Nanjing Forestry University (NFU), the university where Dr. Chang is an honorary professor and has an apartment. The weather was fantastic -- a nice, mild spring day. This day was full of wonder, discovery, and student-student interaction. This could well be the best day of the trip!

Our first order of business was to visit NFU and meet their students. Here is a photo of our students in a great NFU classroom (hey, wood floors and full AV!)

NFU faculty and staff took us on a tour of their oustanding labs and pilot paper machine. The Chinese government has poured lots of money into all of the engineering schools, and the labs are full of gleaming equipment and computer stations.

But the best part of the day was when NFU paper science students were mingled with NCSU students. You should have heard the excited chatter in that room!!!! A large part of this experience was this kind of "bridge-making."

Okay, we have to spend a little time on the lunch hosted by NFU. This is the highest number of courses ever served to Dr. Byrd...and a real display of the culinary diversity of this country! We were served 20 dishes, spanning every part of the animal and plant kingdom. We were increasingly stunned with the advent of each additional dish.






The "regular" part of the meal involved chicken, tofu, beef, pork organs, and lovely things like this little quail, roasted to perfection.

But, as the meal wore on past the point where we had become accustomed to termination, more and more dishes continued to come out. We were astounded to see this giant fish, bubbling over charcoal in some tasty broth.

Just when we thought it was all over, here comes ANOTHER giant fish.

The students were joking that we had covered all the species in the animal kingdom except amphibians, when out comes this stir-fried bull frog. We then joked about the lack of a reptile...and out comes a turtle.









This is a view of the aftermath...holy cow, what a meal! And for LUNCH for pete's sake!













After this potentially-crippling meal, we went up to the large forested park up the mountainside. This park features a Ming tomb and the tomb of Sun Yat-sen, the great and revered uniter of China. Dr. Yat-sen helped move China from its dynastic past to its position as a republic.







Here is our group, at the top of the reported 1000 steps it takes to climb up to the Sun Yat-sen tomb. A bee-yoo-tee-ful view of the city, a beautiful monument.










To top off this wonderful day, Dr. Chang and his wife Ann hosted a dinner at a great restaurant in downtown Nanjing, seen here. We invited students from NFU to attend.










This was one heckuva dinner. Lots of wonderful dishes...and some that were "challenging." But what was so great was the excited interaction between the NCSU and the NFU students.

We had a lot of wonderful dishes at this great banquet...but, by far, the one that got our attention was one called "stinky, smelly tofu." Shown here, it is the analogue of blue cheese. Unfortunately, it smells just like sewage.

We finished up our evening with a trip to the Confucian temple, which turned out to be an enormous outdoor bazaar...sort of like the state fair.

What a beautiful day. Two banquets!!!!!! A national park!!!! Fantastic students!!! Most of us came home and collapsed into a heap.