10.03.08 First Touring

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Hi!

So I thought I had lost my camera, but I just found it! This past week was my week off of school so I did a bit of touring. Unfortunately, I didn’t have my camera! I should be getting pictures of it all from friends though. Meanwhile, I will now upload the pictures I didn’t upload earlier for you to check out.

So I started out this week resolved to find some Chinese recipes online and learn how to cook Chinese style. I have been trying to cook typical food from home and it is very expensive and hard to find the right ingredients. The main store to buy foreign food here is called Metro and it is like a Costco back home. It is funny though because their super sized items are the same size we would think of as normal back home. For example, you get four rolls of paper towel in the super size Metro pack. Back home you’d get like sixteen!

I found recipes and collected ingredients for all kinds of Chinese food like fried rice, chow mein, chicken and pineapple, green beans and tomatoes and egg (This is extremely popular here!). I also found a recipe for cheese enchiladas…I miss Mexican food sooooo much! Cheese is ridiculously expensive here, but so worth it! So far I have made some fried rice that is pretty good. I’ve been eating out a lot this past week so I haven’t had time to try out all of these recipes yet. I will keep you updated. By the time some of you visit, perhaps I will be a pro!

Anyways, the first place I went this week was to the Three Gorges Museum here in Chongqing. I took a taxi out there to check it out. I think admittance to the museum was free because of the holiday…otherwise I managed to skip out on paying, but I couldn’t find anywhere to pay! It was pretty large, four stories. Overall, it is a history museum of this area. I found the official garb of all of the different groups in china and the past currency to be the most interesting displays. There was a huge display of an early era in which there were tons of stones….I think the stones were supposed to be tools, but they looked like ordinary stones….not carved into shapes or anything. I bought an English tape deck so I could listen to the tour in English, but I got overwhelmed after the first few info sessions (Each one was like five minutes long!) so I only listened to it on the displays of interest to me. They had an actually grave with a glass top on the floor with skeletons they recovered of a family. At first I thought the grave and skeletons were models, but after listening to the tape I learned they were authentic. They suspect the family was killed together for doing something wrong to their clan.

Afterwards, I wandered around the area outside the museum a little and came to a bird park. In general, I hate birds…I don’t know why, but I always have. Particularly, I hate pigeons! This is the only bird they had at this park…and lots of them. Maybe they were doves; I honestly can’t tell the difference. Well at first it looks kind of cute because there are all of these kids (from one to eight years old) trying to play with the birds. I decide to sit and watch. Kids can buy bird seed and then all of the pigeons will come up to them and eat out of their hands. The kids will then try to catch the birds. Parents are out there taking pictures at mach seven. On the one hand they look adorable; on the other I can’t help but think about how disgusting it is! On a side note, one interesting thing about toddlers here is that they don’t wear diapers. The crotch of their pants is missing and they just relieve themselves whenever wherever. It is very common to see a toddler peeing in the middle of the road or on the sidewalk. They just let it flow!


On Tuesday, I went to a Buddhist Temple just outside of Chongqing. A large group of us from the school went. It was much more impressive than I ever expected. Upon first arriving, you see an enormous golden Buddha. At first I thought this was all there was to the temple. You can go inside the giant Buddha and there are thousands of tiny Buddha statues going up in a cone in the middle. You walk around the outside of this cone. They had beads in the temple that reminded me of Rosaries. Turns out the idea for the Rosary came from early Crusaders who came to India and saw these prayer beads and liked the idea so much they took it home. There are all kinds of stands for buying incense to light around the temple. There are pillows set up right outside in front of Buddha where people take turns kneeling to the statue and bowing to Buddha three times.

After this main temple, we walked to an area behind it and there were probably 8-10 more shrines of Buddha. They were all in different buildings, one was up on the side of a mountain (believe me this was not a fun walk! Although to get to this one, we had to walk by a river that was orange. Pam and I were like “oh how nice they painted the rocks under the river orange!” Then everyone else informed us they were orange from iron pollution!) Each of the shrines had the pillows and pillars for incense set up nearby. In some of the temples, they had all of these boxes which looked a lot like little mail boxes at the post office. Turns out this is where you can bury family members. You buy them a box and have their ashes stored there. Some of the boxes were open. I assume this is because the family members were there that day. They would leave gifts for their deceased such as apples and flowers. Some of them also had photos inside (again I’m assuming of the person who passed).

As you walked, there were statues decorating the gardens and paths. We went with Sabrina, one of the Chinese teachers at the school. She knew quite a bit about Buddha because of her grandmother. She would tell us about all of the different statues. There was a turtle statue you could rub for long life and then tie a red ribbon around your wrist. Another different turtle statue you rubbed and then put your hands in your pocket to bring you more money. Also as we walked around, there were many families burning paper. I guess you buy this paper-which is supposed to be money in the afterlife. Then you burn it up to you family members. Sabrina told us a story about when she was young her grandmother had a dream that her aunt needed money in the afterlife and so they came up and burned the money. One thing that I like about this idea is that it seems to bring the whole family back together again. It was not just one family member burning the money, it was many family members reunited to send something to a common loved one.

As you walked around, there were many monks in orange garbs and shaved heads. We didn’t purposely take any photos of them because we thought it might be rude, but you may see some in the background. Also they had statues of the Chinese animals based on year. Sabrina and I were both the tiger so you will see our photo with the tiger.

Also this week I went to an Avril Lavigne concert. I was invited to go with a boy named Alex and his girlfriend. I met Alex through our lawyer; he is our lawyer’s English translator. The whole night turned into one weird disaster after another! First off Alex calls me at like 10am saying he is at my house to pick me up. First off the concert starts at 8pm so I am utterly confused. Second off he never calls to tell me he’s coming over and third off I am not even home! I’m at the temple. So I tell him I’m sorry, but I’ll have to call him when I get home to make plans. So this is already starting off weird….seriously who shows up without calling ten hours prior to an event. At this point, I’m assuming he wants to hang out prior to the concert, but I am not overly fond of this idea since I don’t know him well. So I wait a while after I get home to call. He wants me to get dinner with him and his girlfriend and then just him and I will go on to the concert because his gf decided not to go. Meanwhile, I’ve found out that Pam (the director’s wife/teacher I work with) with is also going with one of the students at the school and her parent and they offer to give me a ride. Tempting as it was to ride with them, I decide I should go to dinner since they were kind enough to invite me.

Alex tells me I can take a Taxi to them and to just give my phone to the driver and he’ll tell the driver where to go. Don’t ask me why, but the taxi driver literally starts screaming at him and they argue for like five minutes. Then they hang up, Alex calls back and wants to talk to the driver again and they argue for another five! I am so confused! Anyways, I finally arrive at a perfectly normal location that I’ve been to before-a shopping center in the main district….totally don’t understand the arguing and confusion! Well I meet up with Alex and his girlfriend and they give me a present. Why? I don’t know! But, I am a little concerned because I have been warned that presents in China always come with stipulations and nothing is ever just a present. So in my mind I am thinking ‘what does this mean I owe you?’ But what can you do? Say no thank you? Obviously not! So I accept and say thank you. Alex’s girlfriend cannot speak English and I am obviously far from any type of fluency in Chinese so again awkward situation. At this point I am so freakin happy I waited to call and meet up. I was calculating that I only had about and hour and a half before we had to leave for the concert.

They want to go shopping because there are sales everywhere since it is a Chinese holiday. Again awkward! For me, clothes’ shopping is something I only find enjoyable with my best friends, not with strangers! Not to mention nothing in China fits me…unless I search for XXL… which are not easy to come by. So after suffering through this, we decide to get food. I’m not particularly hungry, but I figure anything is better than this shopping. They take me to a place called Country Style Cooking. English name, but definitely not English food! I don’t even know what most of the things on the menu are. I end up with French fries and an ice thing that I thought was an oreo shake when I ordered it….but definitely was not! Also I forgot to mention that when I first meet them, Alex asks me to put two juice bottles in my purse because they are making his backpack too heavy….what?!

After dinner, we decide to head to the concert. This was actually cool because we took the monorail. I pretty much take a taxi everywhere because I don’t know how to read the bus schedules. We get to the stop and head to the concert. Outside there are vendors everywhere selling all types of knick knacks. Alex insists on getting me this devil horns headband that lights up. So then we get into the line where they check your bags before going into the concert. I immediately know these juice bottles are going to be an issue…it is a Canadian group-I think with a US record deal so I highly doubted they allowed you to bring drinks in. Of course I’m right so I get ready to throw the bottles away. Alex grabs them mid toss and starts arguing with the lady about how ridiculous it is that we can’t take the drinks in. I continue through the checkpoint. I have to wait on the other side for like five minutes for him to get through his little discussion. I can’t believe it!

The concert is in a stadium with doors all the way around. The doors are clearly labeled as are our tickets, but Alex walks up to every single door to ask if this is the right one. I knew it wasn’t so I started just waiting at the sidewalk for him. Finally we get through. Once we find our seats, I need to use the restroom and he goes with me. The restrooms are utterly disgusting and the line is atrocious so I decide I’ll just hold it. Alex is super concerned about this even though I kept insisting I was fine. He asks some guards if there are any other restrooms. They say no, but again he has to argue with them…..aaaaahhhh! So we get back to our seats, which are on the floor in front of the stage….they were seventy-five US dollar tickets (500 RMB) (the second best kind you could buy). Sitting next to me is a nice man with his daughter. They both speak English so I talked with them for a while before the show. He studied for many years in the US. The concert starts-surprisingly, there was no opening act. Initially, everyone is standing up on their chairs screaming and yelling. It is so funny because on the tickets it says no cameras and no light sticks and everyone has both. About three songs into it, about two dozen police come into the audience and tell everyone to get down. Not just off of their chairs, but to sit down in their seats. A rock concert where you have to sit! Lots of people were reluctant, but the police started going row by row and pushed anyone still standing down on their shoulders. I sat down before they got to me!

Anyways, the singer, Avril Lavigne, seemed so confused because she kept telling the audience to stand up and noone would. I felt kind of bad for her! At the end of the concert, her boyfriend from sum 41 came on stage. I think everyone liked him more than her because they couldn’t stay in their seats. Slowly as his song progressed more and more people started standing up and jumping up and down jamming to his beat.

After the concert I called my coworker to see if I could get a ride home with them since they live near me. They said no problem. Well then I give the phone to Alex so he can figure out where we need to go to meet them. I figured even if he didn’t know, he could ask someone where the road was. This was apparently too difficult. They kept telling me to hurry because there was a police man telling them to move. After ten minutes of not getting any closer to knowing where they were, I told them just to leave and I would get home not to worry. I was getting so frustrated because Alex seemed not to be in any rush to find them and they obviously were in a crunch with the police officer. I came to find out later that they were waiting on the main road completely blocking one lane of traffic leaving the concert. The police officer kept yelling at them, but he couldn’t give them a ticket or make them officially move because the parent had a special government license plate. I felt so bad!

So after missing them, I assume we’ll take the monorail or taxi, but of course there are thousands of others trying to do the same thing. I am getting so exhausted and frustrated. Finally, Alex says he has some friends leaving the concert with a car and we can catch a ride with them. Then he takes off running. So I run after him. We ran forever…I was literally dying! Not to mention I was not in the best shoes for a marathon! Well then we get to where we’re supposed to meet them and they don’t show up for another fifteen minutes! Oh my gosh!!! Meanwhile, as we’re running people scream hello at me and then as we’re waiting I get photo requests! What an evening! I did make it home alive though!

The next morning, I went with Pam to Chendu to see the Panda Bear Research Institute. I really wanted to do this and when I mentioned that I was going alone, Pam volunteered to go with me. I am so glad she did! The Panda’s were amazing. You will see lots of beautiful photos of them. We paid a little extra for a tour guide, which was well worth it because he took us to the main areas and told us about the pandas. It was 30 RMB ($5) to get in and 50 RMB ($8) for the guide. Cheap I know! We took a bus to Chendu…it was 120 RMB or about twenty dollars each way. We stayed in a four star hotel downtown which was 600 RMB a night or about ninety dollars. After going to dinner Pam and I decided to explore the hotel a little. They have a KTV, a couple restaurants, a massage spa and a theatre. We decided to try to see what was on at the theatre. We of course had no idea what the advertisement said, but a group of men got off the elevator as we were leaving the theatre and all of them simultaneously did a head whipping double take of us! We started cracking up laughing as we left wondering what in the world must have been happening at that theatre to get such a reaction! Breakfast was included with the hotel…although I did not know what most of the food was. We ended up having to share a table it was so crowded. We got seated with a couple who had just been married in the hotel the day before.

The best part of the trip was the food (minus the breakfast)! I miss western food (that is what they call normal food here) so much! We ate at a little western café for lunch, I got a club sandwich. For dinner we ate at a Mexican restaurant and I got tacos! I wasn’t even hungry when we went, but I ate my plate clean! For some reason, Chendu seemed way more calm, orderly and less stressful than Chongqing. Even though I think Chendu is bigger. Before heading back to Chongqing, we stopped at a little western grocery store where I bought stuff to make tacos. I want to try to cook western food for some of my Chinese friends. This store is the first place I’ve seen with sour cream! I wanted it sooooo much, but it obviously wouldn’t survive the four hour bus trip back to Chongqing. When we got back to Chongqing, the taxi drivers tried to rip us off. I think this only happens to foreigners at the airport and transportation stations because they think the foreigners are clueless. We had to switch cabs because the first one tried to triple charge us!

I went to BeiBei, a town north of Chongqing to visit Angela, one of the Chinese teachers I work with, and her husband. We planned to go to the hotsprings. Once we meet up, they tell me first we have to go to a wedding. I am wearing jeans, but they said that was ok and it was! Everyone wears normal casual clothing except the wedding party. The bride dressed in a western white gown and stood outside to greet everyone and take photos. There is no church; it is just a reception hall. We found seats at a table where food was already put out on a lazy susan. After a while the wedding party came up and there were toasts and speeches made. The bride and groom exchanged rings. They lit a bunch of candles arranged in a heart and poured champagne over a pyramid of glasses. As they walked up the aisle, they had lots of sprinkler explosives and confetti exploded on the bride and groom. It was really very pretty. After the ceremony, more food came out and everyone ate. Food seemed to keep coming out forever. More and more dishes! We ate in the traditional Chinese way of just grabbing what you want off of the lazy susan with your chopsticks. One of Angela’s husband’s friends told Angela’s husband that he wanted to play Marjarn (I know my spelling is wrong-it is a popular Chinese game with tiles) with me after we ate. He came over to toast me as we were eating and told me he wanted to play Marjarn. After we finished, we did go play Marjarn, but we didn’t tell him. As we were leaving the wedding altogether, we ran into him and he was drunk as a skunk! The other guys he was with were also drunk and were slowly undressing- half of them were missing shirts! Thank goodness we avoided all of them!

Backing up a little, on the way to the wedding, we had some time to kill so we went to see Angela’s University. This is one of the largest universities in Chongqing. We walked all over. I really enjoyed the art building as there was art up everywhere from all of the different students. Angela’s husband is a teacher at the University, so he had a small motor bike stored on campus that he uses for transportation. He offered to take me on a ride. It was so much fun! We rode all over the university.

After the wedding, we went to the hot springs. They were not at all what I expected. I expected a spring in the middle of the wilderness that you would run through in your swimsuit like a sprinkler in the backyard. The hot springs here are resorts with a whole bunch of pools with water that is naturally heated underground. I was a bit disappointed! The first place we went was too expensive. We only wanted to stay a couple hours and this place only had 24 hour packages that included all of your meals and a room. So we went to another one. This one had several pools. The first one was a large pool and there was an aerobics instructor so everyone was doing water aerobics in the water. That was kind of fun. The next pool was a fish pool. There were hundreds-maybe even thousands of tiny fish. I did not much care for this. They kept biting me. Everyone was trying to hold still so the fish would come to them, but not me. I kept moving to keep them away. I think I was seriously annoying the little boy next to me! There were a variety of pools of different temperatures. There were also a bunch of small private pools that looked like hot tubs. I kind of thought it was disgusting all of the people in all of the pools and no chlorine or sanitation! I was a little concerned about contracting something! They also had two saunas-a wet and a dry one. Before we left, Angela and I went in one of the hamster balls they had in one of the larger pools. Ever since I first saw one of those I have wanted to do it. It was fun, but exhausting! Angela’s husband kept knocking us around…as did some random people!

So I have written way too much! Sorry this will keep you busy for a while! I promise to try to get photos up soon…I have to get them from Pam and Sabrina.

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