Out of the Furnace and into the Hair Dryer

"I feel like I just walked into a hair dryer!" complained fellow Fulbrighter, Elaine as a few of us left the weak but acceptable air conditioning of The Trade Union Hotel to venture out onto the streets of Chongqing on our first night in the city to see what we could find. What we found, after exploring the park: ladies doing aerobics, kids at rollerblade practice, men either A. sitting around with their shirts off and smoking, or B. playing basketball, was the lobby of the Hilton Hotel where we luxuriated in American style couches, air conditioning, wine, and prices. (English teacher note: I'm aware that the previous sentence probably had numerous grammatical errors. It was for effect, OK?) We had landed in 102 degree heat around mid-afternoon, and a few hours later, things hadn't changed much. Thankfully today was relatively cooler, and our Chongqing guides kept the outside activities to a minimum.

Chongqing, also known as the "mountain city," is situated within Sichuan Province, but it is its own municipality that reports directly to the Central Government. It's comparable to Washington, D.C. It is noticeably hillier here. Our manual transmission bus has had some interesting stops and starts on the hills, and yesterday we attacked a huge staircase in our neighborhood.

According to our scholar-escort, Nevan, it's the largest city in the world, but don't try to check that fact on Wikipedia because you won't find it. I'm really not sure on all the details, but what I understand is that the city proper is only (only!) around 7 or 8 million, while the rest of the municipality, which is approximately the size of not Rhode Island, but Maine, holds another 24 or 25 million to make a grand total of 32 million people and counting, thus, the largest "city" in the world. Personally, I don't think it counts if you're trying to tell me the city is the size of Maine. Flying in here I saw a lot of green open space.

Anyway, Chongqing is also a city of over 4,000 bridges. Remember the theme: China does nothing on a small scale. It is located at the confluence of the Yangtze and a smaller tributary. There is a point that juts out into the river that looks much like lower Manhattan, except that there is no end to the high rises here. You might think there are a lot of tall buildings in NYC, but they are nothing compared to the skyscrapers in Chinese cities. China wins at having lots of skyscrapers.

Let's see, Chongqing is also called the "fog city," because it's foggy here much of the year. Today I learned that this was helpful during WWII when Chongqing became a wartime capital for China and Japan was bombing the heck out of it.

When it's not the "fog city," it is also one of China's "Three Furnaces," because, as our trip pamphlet says, it "is unbearably hot in the summer." (See the beginning of the blog for proof.)

Things here feel a bit calmer than Beijing and definitely more real than Xi'an. There is the modern: elevated trains and high rises, but there is also some of the old: people carrying baskets of fruit suspended from either end of a pole across their backs. So far, so good.

We will spend one of our evenings here out on a river cruise, so I hope to have some interesting photos from that night. For now, here's the morning and evening view from my hotel room: