Rice is Nice

The night train was not all that fun, after all. The food in the dining car was the second-worst of the trip. And I woke up with a big pain in my neck, making it hard for me to turn my head.

When we arrived in Chongqing, it was really early, so there wasn't really anything to do. And the city was pretty much as I'd pictured it: a hot, humid, gray mass of a place sprawling along a muddy river. There are about 10 million people in the Chongqing metropolitan area. And this was the first place in China where I saw plenty of homeless people (they were all waking up in the square where we went in the morning) and even a small shanty area. Despite the large population, there is virtually nothing to see and do there. We were just passing through to board our Yangtze River cruise.

A ton of people, but nothing to see

Stephen and I checked our bags at the train station and made our way to the center of town. We ate some breakfast bought on the street (again, fried dough is always good no matter where you are). We watched old ladies doing their morning exercises. Some danced in unison (or tried to), some did exercises with swords, and a few loners did tai chi.

Chongqing's historical significance is that it was China's war-time capital in the 1940's "Anti-Japanese War." We spent way too much time and money trying to get to a museum further west, devoted to Admiral Stillwell and the Flying Tigers. Eventually, with a lot of asking, we found it. The museum for the Flying Tigers was pretty small but interesting, and the home of Stillwell and the museum there about US involvement in the defense of China was great. Of course, most of the visitors were Americans. And I'm sure most of them were boarding cruises as well. It turned out that there was a metro stop near the museum, so we took that to the center of town.

We did hotpot, the local Chongqing specialty, for lunch. This basically involved cooking various items in a boiling cauldron of very spicy oil. Tasty, though.

With much trial and error, we were able to board our boat in the afternoon and get one last meal in Chongqing. It's not a great place, but it's not as awful as I'd imagined. There really is nothing to do, but people are clearly moving there because there is money to be made, either at the bottom of the pyramid or at the top. The center of town as your Cartier, Zegna, and the like, so it's working for somebody, I guess.