chongqing update

Looky! A less-than-two-week break between posts! Miracles, not ceasing!
A few things scrounged from my notes that I didn’t sneak into the last post:
– Re: Old Navy. A lesson to those writing foreign-correspondent blogs: You write 1800 words on life in Hawaii and China, and the one thing anyone leaves a comment on is an American discount retail chain. But I forgot one anecdote. This British guy walked up to a staff person and asked where the shorts were. “We’re not selling shorts any more,” she said. The British guy looked perplexed, with a side of angry. The staff person explained that sales patterns and promotions are all determined by Old Navy corporate, back in San Francisco, and HQ had decided that it was time to sell corduroys and fall/winter gear. So no shorts.
“But this is Hawaii!” the Brit perceptively cried. “It’s always shorts weather here!” No matter — Old Navy was done selling shorts for the year. Were I a business reporter, I’d have a column out of that one exchange.
– My digital camera was stolen out of my luggage in Argentina a couple months ago — damn those Argentines! — which meant I had to buy a new one. (Not that I used it much. I went to Nigeria a few months ago and didn’t take a single picture. Then I went to Argentina, Uruguay and Chile and didn’t take a single picture. Many people have expressed their anger over these facts.)
Anyway, I bought a Canon PowerShot SD400, and geezumpete, it’s awesome. It’s tiny tiny tiny — which means I always have it in my pocket, which means I actually take photos. Lesson learned: A camera has to be small enough to accidentally snort if I’m actually going to use it.
Back to Chongqing. I apologize for badmouthing it before I arrived — it’s actually quite a charming little city. (By “little,” of course, I mean “the size of metro Los Angeles and Chicago combined.”) It actually reminds me quite a bit of Chengdu, the aforementioned Chicago in my western imperialist U.S.-city-comparison game. Lots of hills, beautiful greenery everywhere, and a nice mix of urban and rural feel — without the fake Epcot feel you get in parts of Shanghai.
And, unlike Shanghai, it’s still ludicrously cheap. The Hilton I’m staying in, which is in the running for the nicest place I’ve ever stayed, is $80 a night — and it probably the most expensive place in town by a mile. Ten of us went out to dinner last night and the final bill for all of us was 37 yuan — meaning a dozen-dish meal of dumplings and veggies and tofu and everything ended up costing 45 cents a person. We had lunch at one of the nicest places in town, a sort of formal Chinese banquet place with gold(-colored) silverware and wooden chairs you could imagine in an emperor’s sitting room. The final bill: about $3 a head.
A few highlights in the couple days I’ve been here so far:
– A bus conversation in which, when our government minder was asked what were the specialties of Chungqing cuisine, he said “snakes.” Which led to peals of discontent from some of the more stomach-sensitive members of our little troupe. After further discussion, it was discovered he’d said “snacks,” which seemed significantly more appetizing.
(We’re actually a pretty iron-stomach lot, it appears. Only two acute digestive incidents among the bunch of us so far, both relatively minor. My only complaint about the food so far is the preponderance of bones in everything — fish, beef, pork, cabbage, etc. But then again, I’m kind of a bone wuss when eating in the U.S., too. I’ll take the child-designed “chicken strips” over even the most user-friendly chicken wings, every time.)
– Spent yesterday morning touring around Chongqing Technology and Business University, a lovely campus where, like everywhere else we’re looking, every building seems to have been built in the last two weeks. We had a group discussion with a bunch of students, and afterwards, the two tall blond men in our group — me and the Australian Michael — were surrounded by girls who wanted to have their picture taken with us. Then came this exchange with three smiling girls:
Girl #1: So did you know that the girls in Chongqing are the most beautiful in all of China?
Me: Actually, I have heard that. [I had, from a couple folks in Shanghai.]
Girl #2: Ah. Well, do you have a foreign lover here yet?
Me: [Awkward silence]
– Food highlight so far is Chongqing hotpot, a local favorite similar to fondue. Start with a boiling cauldron of oil at your table, evenly split between moderately spicy and mouth-roof-melting hot. Then you take any number of things (little pork meatballs, quail eggs, something that looked suspiciously Spam-like, shoe leather — er, I mean, strips of tofu) and throw them in. They cook, and you fish them out of the oil with your chopsticks, dump them into a bowl of non-boiling oil to cool them down and increase the lipid count, and eat.
Of course, grabbing a quail egg out of boiling oil with chopsticks is a great producer of humorous moments — and only a mediocre producer of actual quail eggs in your belly. (They’re slippery little suckers.) Hotpot is a risky endeavor on several levels — boiling-oil splatters being the most obvious, but let’s not forget about the damage to one’s ego done by losing a five-minute chopstick battle with an oily mushroom. But tasty nonetheless.
Particularly if the meal is topped with a street vendor’s Magnum bar. Magnum is, of course, the best brand of ice-cream bar you can buy in China — sorta Dove Bar-esque. Hadn’t had one in four years, but mmmmmmm the memories. Nothing like one at the end of a hot day of hiking or mushroom wrestling.
– Spent an afternoon visiting the old Guomindang prisons where Communists were kept — and eventually massacred — during the Chinese civil war. The official name of the place is the U.S. Chiang Kaishek Criminal Acts Exhibition Hall, so I was expecting a healthy dose of anti-American propaganda. (U.S. relations with China in the 1940s were complex — we favored Chiang and his Guomindang [KMT], but during WWII we wanted China to be as strong as possible so they could fight the Japanese, who had invaded Manchuria some years earlier. So we favored cooperation between the KMT and the Communists against the Japanese. But around 1944, Chiang got tired of that, and the American decided to pick sides again — with the KMT — when the war was over.)
But I was disappointed — no stars-and-stripes burning, no demon-eyed Uncle Sams staring down from propaganda posters. Just standard-issue Communist hero-making and Chiang-bashing. The next day we went to the Stillwell Museum, the Chongqing home of U.S. General Joseph Stillwell, who coordinated anti-Japanese efforts with the Chinese during the war. Stillwell’s viewed as a hero in China — sort of the last good American leader for a while — and the place was filled with warm fuzzies about the pan-Pacific relationship.
By the way, my fellow Fellow Pete is also blogging his trip.