On this short two-day visit, we’re spending most of our time in the Pearl Room, which is where all the 0-2 year old babies are housed and cared for. Today we have a full day of hugging and playing with them. Joel is really great at entertaining them and yesterday had a mound of 5 little ones climbing all over him.

Most (if not all) of the 20+ babies have some sort of special need – from down’s syndrome to internal organ malfunctions, and while we were there yesterday the police and a hospital worker came in with yet another baby. We have huge respect for the people who work here and care for these human beings – who range from newborns to adults. It’s both heart-wrenching and uplifting to see love so tangibly applied to those in dire circumstances.

We arrived at the Tian Chen Lou Hotel (booked for us by Sarah’s Dad Tom, who I must say really has a knack for finding the best hotels) and were taken for dinner at a nearby restaurant by Grace, a friend of Tom’s who is about our age and works as a lawyer in Chengdu. We went with her to a Bible study where we decided to try to follow along in Chinese as best we could. There was enough repetition of some words and phrases that I thought I’d learned some new vocabulary…until I tried to recall it the next day. The only thing I’m confident about at the moment is that “daogao” means prayer. This ended up being the first of several experiences we’ve had with various groups involved with Christianity here. (More on this later, probably.)

We were staying near one of the city’s main tourist attractions, 杜甫草堂, aka “Du Fu’s Thatched Cottage” (or more literally, Du Fu’s Grass House). We’ve started to pick up a few things about Chinese history on this trip, but this was one time where we didn’t really know anything about Du Fu and it probably would have been a lot more significant if we did. Du Fu is apparently known as one of the greatest poets in Chinese history (he was writing around 200 AD, if memory serves). Like a lot of poets, scholars, and literati back in the day, he was also a government official, and from what I gathered after seeing the exhibits, the period when Du Fu lived in Chengdu was both bad for him, since he was driven there while escaping from some kind of uprising or rebellion, and good for him, since he really liked this grass hut, and he wrote some of his most celebrated poetry there. Unfortunately we didn’t leave with any examples of the poetry. (Incidentally, the only book I did leave Chengdu with was a hastily purchased copy of “Impressions of Chengdu,” a book which looked like an interesting travelogue while I was in the gift shop but which, upon further reading, seems to be more of a sycophantic PR piece. I could be wrong, but I haven’t been able to bring myself to read much more of it.)

We also spent time at a number of other tourist spots, including Jinli Street, which is one of China’s many popular “ancient” streets, revamped for tourist purposes. These streets are usually the best place to find all the local snacks in one convenient row, so we indulged in many of Chengdu’s famous (well, not necessarily famous to us, but allegedly famous) snacks, mostly involving the aforementioned ma la flavors. Spicy goodness was enjoyed by all. We ended the evening strolling around the area, using a very forlorn drunk man in a suit as a landmark, and finally finishing up at the Traditional Chinese Dairy Queen.

(side note by Sarah: I have been kind of obsessed with softserve ice cream and have thus far had ice cream at most of the major imported chains including KFC, MacDonald’s, Baskin Robbins, Haagen Dazs, and Dairy Queen. So far in my opinion, Dairy Queen does the best strawberry sundae. Just so you know, I have ONLY gotten ice cream and no other fast food at these establishments.)

(side note by Joel: Sarah has a free pass to eat ice cream since she is pregnant. I only partake occasionally.)

The next day we headed out of town to the Panda Research Base, which in our trip planning was Sarah’s #1 priority. We indeed saw the pandas. We saw many, many pandas. We saw adult pandas, baby pandas, and teenaged (so to speak) pandas. We saw pandas eating bamboo. We saw red pandas rubbing all over things to mark their territory. We saw a panda walk on its hind legs and climb a tree surprisingly quickly in order to get a treat shaped like a mooncake. (Lest you think this is cruel, we were told they do this once in a while to make sure the pandas get some practice working for their food, so they’ll be able to better fend for themselves if they’re released to the wild. I think.) And, in perhaps my favorite bit of trivia about pandas, we learned that these majestic animals eat 40 kilograms of bamboo a day, 32 kilograms of which they poop. We saw some. It was green.

Later that day we ended up at another set of tourist streets, known as the “Wide and Narrow Alleys,” which were also really interesting. They were much more geared, I thought, toward upper middle class tourists, so there was a lot more high end shopping, fancy restaurants, etc. Our only major stop was at the novelty gift shop “Jiong Box,” which I really enjoyed although I felt some embarrassment when I considered whether was basically the Chinese equivalent of something like Spencer Gifts. I’m going to go ahead and say it’s not. I got a couple of kitschy notebooks designed from mid 20^th century Chinese English textbooks.

On Monday and Tuesday we stayed with a PhD classmate of mine, Todd, and his family. They have been in Sichuan province for almost 20 years with Mennonite Partners in China. It was so nice to be in a festive atmosphere complete with Christmas tree, hot chocolate, and
Christmas carols on the stereo. Todd took us to some of Chengdu’s churches including a brand new one and one which is over 100 years old, and the local Christian bookstore. We also had a chance to talk shop, as he’s also doing his dissertation on some aspects of university English education in China. It’s always nice to be able to talk to somebody who knows what you’re talking about. Sarah politely tolerated that bit.

Finally, we ended our time in Sichuan by taking in a very touristy but very fun show based on Sichuan Opera, one of the more famous styles of Chinese opera which is known for its “bian mian” or ‘face changing,’ in which performers change from one mask to another at an astonishingly rapid rate. It’s always a huge crowd pleaser. (I’d seen one similar performance in Ningbo a few months ago.) This was more of a vaudevillian type variety show, with a loose storyline involving a henpecked gambler, a pair of ill fated lovers, a magical mask which may or may not have enabled time travel, and so on. There was also a rap about Chendgu snacks, a scene involving fire breathing which seemed to take place in hell (or at least an anguished mental state), a lot of very skillful dancing, and classic Chinese percussion, the only part of the music that was performed live. (Recreation of the sounds, roughly: “doom clack doom clack dooodoodoodoodoodoodoom claclaclaclaclaclack!)

Earlier this week we flew from Chengdu to Xi’An, a city which also has a lot to offer in terms of history, tourism, and incredibly fast urban development. More on that soon!

32nd floor penthouse view, daytime

32nd floor rooftop view, nighttime

In some ways, Chongqing is like San Francisco, with its steep winding streets and foggy climate. That’s pretty much where all similarity ends – Chongqing’s most famous feature is its 麻辣火锅 (ma la huo guo) – meaning spicy hotpot. This hot pot combines two different kinds of peppers – Sichuan pepper and red peppers – for a unique combination that both numbs your mouth and sets it on fire. In some ways, this “麻辣” flavor represents the character of the city and its residents – fast moving and growing in size and prosperity at a blinding rate – and that’s saying something for China. The complex of high rises where we stayed didn’t exist three years ago.


One of the first things we ate for lunch in Chongqing: 干煸土豆丝 （gan bian tudo si) – basically a type of hash brown that was liberally sprinkled with Sichuan pepper – a total surprise to our unprepared tongues! (We’ve ordered this dish in other provinces where Sichuan pepper wasn’t added)

[Joel's addition]
In addition to the assault on the taste buds which Sichuan food presents, we were also surprised when, during our hotpot dinner with our Couchsurfing hosts (Ben, a native of Humboldt county, where we spent 2005-2007, and Jin, a Chongqing native), the loudest explosion any of us had ever heard rocked the restaurant so hard that the oily hotpot broth was blasted all over Ben’s brand new white-t-shirt. Luckily, this carnage was the only battle damage anyone sustained — as best as we could determine, a huge truck blew a tire right as it was passing the restaurant.
[end Joel's addition]

Our explorations of Chongqing were cursory but fascinating.

We went to visit the old quarter of the city called Ciqikou, where some streets have been preserved and vamped up for tourists. This older area had lots of little streets to poke up and down, and overall the impression was that everything is built vertically along winding alleys to give the perspective of jumbled, angular dwellings built in a sort of pleasantly chaotic manner.

The next day we went on a Chinese tour to the Dazu rock carvings – a wholly new adventure as it was our first Chinese only speaking tour. It was both a great affirmation at how much Chinese we have learned since first coming to China in 2007, and a chilling reminder of just how much we have to go before really understanding things in any great depth. The Dazu caves are set in a very pretty area about 2 hours’ drive from Chongqing, and feature amazing carvings of religious motifs on several cliff faces. These carvings date back at least 1400 years and combine Buddhist, Taoist, and Confucian beliefs.

After the Dazu rock carvings, we were sent to see a demonstration at one of the local factories that makes knives (the local manufacturing industry). We saw quite an impressive demonstration which included the presenter banging a cleaver on an aluminum pipe without any damage to the blade, cutting through leather with ease, and an electric razor that was set into a bowl of water and turned on. The price was a steal – 120 CNY for a set of three knives, kitchen shears, and a multifunction vegetable peeler (that’s about $20 USD) – but we decided to forgo the tempting offer.

Later that night, we went with our Couchsurfing hosts to trivia night at a foreign run-bar (“Da Rasta” — reggae-themed, like most bars catering to foreigners, based on some strange supposition that all foreigners love reggae music and idolize Bob Marley). We arrived late and missed the first round out of five, but Joel is convinced that if we had come in time we would have swept the whole thing. As it was, we ended up coming in 3rd place out of 4.

All in all we enjoyed a great visit in Chongqing, but I personally was glad to leave the frenetic pace of this hypercity and come to Chengdu… to be continued…

We are still experiencing things at a faster rate than I am able to write them down! I’m writing the beginning of this post on a train from Chongqing to Chengdu. We’re in the heart of ma la, aka ‘numb and spicy’ country, and enjoying every minute of it so far. I thought perhaps I first ought to mention what we did on the remainder of our cruise. Much lounging occurred, as usual, and last Thursday and Friday we had excursions to Shen Nong Stream, a tributary of the Yangtze, where we took a ferry through some lovely scenery and then took a ride in some local “peapod boats” which in older days were once pulled through shallow waters by naked guys. To great disappointment, this did not happen while we were there, but we did get some postcards depicting it.

During this tour, our boat was filmed by a crew from CCTV, China’s biggest TV network, the tiny boat overloaded with the camera crew who actually made us paddle back out after the tour and made the tour guide repeat several things she’d already said. I kept my head down and tried not to look like a foreigner. Luckily, we had a couple of older Spanish men in our group who gladly accepted the roles of Happy Go Lucky Foreigners Who Love China for the camera. (Not that we don’t love China — we do, actually. We just don’t necessarily want to be on TV.)

On Friday, we visited “Ghost City,” which used to be in a city called Fengdu, but actually the whole town of Fendgu was relocated to the opposite side of the river when the dam was built, leaving only the tourist attraction in its original site. It was definitely kind of a tourist trap, but actually pretty fun and interesting. The tour guide explained that the city was traditionally seen as the gateway to the underworld, the city everyone had to go to in order to be judged before the afterlife . This was apparently based on the name of the city…I don’t quite remember what he said, but the guide said the city was named after two people whose names were Feng and Du, but together Fengdu meant something related to death or judgement or the afterlife, so it became a hot spot for this sort of thing. We enjoyed the various “traditional” and or “incredibly cheesy and touristy” attractions, such as the bridge you’re supposed to walk over, in nine steps exactly, while holding hands, so you’ll stay together forever, the huge stone you’re supposed to lift onto a small platform in order to show you’re a great husband, the rock that you have to balance on in order to prove you’re a good person and don’t deserve to have your intestines torn out in Buddhist hell, and so on.

There were several shows performed by the crew of the boat during the evenings. Although the one we went to was pretty fun (I thought it would be incredibly lame, but it was surprisingly well done) I’m not sure how I felt about this, for a couple of reasons.  First, probably because I had just watched Up the Yangtze, I got the feeling that the daily life of a worker on the boat wasn’t all that enjoyable, and also got the feeling that performance in the show was more or less required. (“Unfortunately, I will be performing tonight,” one of the tour guides said to us.) Second, being a good liberal academic, I am required to be uneasy about the way that Han Chinese dress in ethnic minority costumes and perform traditional dances. That said, for a group of people being required to wear flashy costumes and do dances, they were really good.

Overall I’m really glad we did the cruise – the food was really nice, the service was impeccable (too good, really – if you’re used to the unobtrusive service in China it can get annoying to be asked “Excuse me, sir, may I change your plate” 5 times a day), and most importantly, the awesome room and abundance of leisure time gave us the chance to get used to just spending time together again. After three months of living apart, that was the best bit of the whole trip, if you ask me.

Coming next: Hotpot and other spicy food, explosions, knife salesmanship, trivia night, and more in Chongqing!

The Chinese call the river Changjiang, or ‘long river,’ because, well, it’s really long. I’m not really sure how much of it we traversed, but it felt like a lot. Just watching the small towns and villages (many of them brand new, since the water level has risen drastically due to the Three Gorges Dam) as we lazily floated by was a really interesting experience. Once again our internet connections is too slow for pictures, but we took many of the trees, rocks, and houses we passed.

Like any cruise (I assume), we spent a fair amount of time eating , sleeping, and lounging – in our case, watching episodes of British dramas like Luther (a thrilling but gruesome detective show in the vein of Prime Suspect) and Downton Abbey (a WWI period piece focusing on a kind of upstairs/downstairs cast of characters) and/or drinking tea and eating oranges and sunflower seeds on the balcony. Each day there was an excursion, though, just to get us up and about for a bit

On Saturday, we took a tour of the Three Gorges Dam site. While the dam is the biggest hydroelectric power project in the world, generating approximately 57 bazillion watts of something-or-other a year (whatever the actual number is, it’s 3% of China’s total electricity), it’s not all that exciting to look at unless you are really into hydroelectric power. And I suppose if you happen to be from China you might enjoy the tour as an American might a tour of, say, the Hoover Dam. Personally, I couldn’t muster a whole lot of interest in the dam itself. We also went through one of the three gorges that day – this is where the pictures would really come in handy, because the landscapes are truly beautiful. You have probably seen them on TV or in paintings; these vistas might be one of the things that pops into your head when you try to imagine what China looks like. Anyway, I suppose you’ll have to Google them. Sorry.

Later that night we went through the ship locks. The only locks I’d seen before were the Ballard Locks, which are pretty fun to watch, but these were many, many times bigger. I think it took over three hours to go through all five of them. I don’t know how much higher the water level is on the western side of the dam, but it’s a lot.

I don’t have much time to write as we’re getting up early for a tour of some nearby caves and Buddhist carvings tomorrow (the tour will be entirely in Chinese, so that should be interesting, if not entirely intelligible to us), but we’ll fill in more about our trip soon.

大肚子经济 dà dù zi jīng jì

Literally, “big belly economy”