Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Sichuan Trip, Day Six

Day 6: Today was a little up in the air, but it turned out well.  We didn't end up finding anywhere to go white water rafting, sadly (we tried online, asked the concierge, called the travel bureau, and apparently most of the places are closed for the season.  Boo.), but we found some things to do around Chongqing.  In the morning, we took a bus to the Three Gorges shopping district and then headed to old town Chongqing.  It was a cool little village with narrow cobblestone streets and stores selling all kinds of little products and traditional snacks.  We bought a pineapple roti, some taffy things, ice cream, and squid on sticks (well, actually I was the only one who ate the squid).  There was one guy selling dog teeth out of rotting dog heads on the side of the road, and several places had old communist propaganda posters.

From there, we went to a memorial site for the November 27, 1949 massacre of Chongqing, which none of us had heard of before.  Apparently a few days before the liberation of Chongqing, the nationalist army killed a few hundred political prisoners, who were afterwards labeled martyrs for the communist cause, and a whole memorial complex was built in their honor.  It included a huge plaza and museum, and then up the mountain a ways was the prison where they were kept.  It's so interesting viewing history from another perspective - it truly depends on who's writing it.

Following that, we head back to the city center and spent a while looking for a hotpot place, it being our last night in Chongqing.  After walking for a while and a couple metro stops, we wound up at a place back on a small side street.  Josef didn't want hotpot, but the rest of us ate there.  It was pretty good, although they didn't have the sesame paste sauce I like dipping my hotpot in.  We had a big bowl of chicken broth and a smaller one inside it with spicy broth.  Joel and Nicole opted not to eat the spicy stuff, while Seth and I ate everything.

Afterwards, we started heading back, and I played badminton on the street with a couple of people while everyone else bought treats.  Josef and Nicole went downtown to go shopping/look around, and Seth, Joel and I went back to the Sheraton.  After we left the last subway stop, we took a cable car across the Yangtze.  It was one of the highlights of the day - we could see downtown, and the whole river was lit up with gold and purple lights.  The Sheraton was even more impressive from the cable car - we hadn't realized that it was right on the waterfront before, and it's in a very tall skyscraper with a huge tv screen on one half of it.  After that, we walked back along the river to the hotel.

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