Day 69: Chongqing(重慶)

Last city
While this isn't quite the end of our time in China it is our last city that we will visit, we will then go back to Chengdu and Shenzhen.  So I have updated our map, it will only change if we decide to visit cities outside Taipei while in Taiwan

View Trip so far in a larger map

More Hot Pot
Of course we had to try another hot pot restaurant today.  This time we went to an area called "good eat street", where they had a food court with stands of types of food from all over China.  We found the hotpot section and had another good meal.  This one was spicier than the day before and had bigger pieces of meat.  Charlotte has been having problems with her contacts irritating her eyes all trip and yesterday while eating hotpot, for the first time in her life, the spicy hotpot water splashed directly into her bad eye causing it to immediately turn red and be even more irritated all day.  Today she stayed as far away from the spicy side as she could.  While we really enjoy both hot pots, we still did not feel the could compete with Taiwanese hot pot.   Now Charlotte of course is a bad judge because I don't think she can be impartial, but I also felt the same way.  The broth is very similar, however in both Chengdu and Chongqing the only dipping sauce is a lot of oil with garlic, while usually with Taiwanese hot pots you have a choice of multiple things to dip in.  Also in China you only have meat, vegetables and organs, but it lacks a variety of dumplings, fish balls and other processed foods.  Now the idea that more processed foods make it better sounds weird, but I missed the variety that it offers as opposed to the traditional Chinese hot pots.

From 77 Days in China part 2

More hot pot

Chongqing- A city under construction
After lunch we spent most of the day just wandering around the city and looking for anything cheap we wanted to buy since we would be leaving China soon.  What amazed us about the city is 90% of the stores are closed as the city is planning on a huge overhaul of the buildings.  Almost everything was under construction or had signs saying it was going to be torn down.  We figure China is one of the few countries that can actually force an entire city to close their stores while they rebuild it basically from scratch

From 77 Days in China part 2

From 77 Days in China part 2

From 77 Days in China part 2

From 77 Days in China part 2

From 77 Days in China part 2

From 77 Days in China part 2

From 77 Days in China part 2

From 77 Days in China part 2

From 77 Days in China part 2

First class to Chengdu
We splurged, a whole $3 each, to get first class high speed train tickets to Chengdu.  It was not worth it.  The seats were slightly larger, but they had given us both aisle seats so we werent sitting together.  In addition the only other advantage of first class is a power plug and a table, but both are only accessible to the person with the window seat, normal seats everyone gets at least a tray folding down from the seat in front of them, so our seats were actually probably worse overall than normal tickets, except you are pretty much guaranteed not to have a child peeing in a cup next to you (see earlier entry for that story)

From 77 Days in China part 2

First class