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Finding Signe (Part 1): in Chongqing

11/7/2004
7:00 AM
Holiday Inn Yangtze Chongqing

It’s Sunday morning in Chongqing. Outside our window, 17 floors down, a group of 20 to 30 people move slowly through the morning Tai Chi routine. It’s smoggy, just like yesterday morning, so smoggy that the far side of the Yangtze river is not visible. Cars move down the hill below the hotel and out across the bridge in a constant stream, vanishing into the mist towards the downtown area. On the bluff above the bridge, across the road from the hotel, an abandoned ferris wheel turns slowly in the wind, looking ghostly in the haze.

This is a place of stark contrasts. The hotel is very nice, as is our room. Across the street, though, is a 20 story concrete building that’s nothing but a shell—construction never completed, or damaged in some way, who knows. It appears to be inhabited, though, as clotheselines are visible as far up as we can see. The entire city seems to be in that half-completed or half-destroyed flux. Below the hotel towards the river is a massive construction project, surrounded by decaying buildings.

Yesterday we walked throughout the neighborhood, following the twinsting streets around and down the hill towards the Yangtze. There are dogs everywhere, mostly small dogs that look something like Tibetan spaniels, but also larger dogs. Given the chaos in the roads, vehicles of all sized speeding around insanely and people moving through the traffic as possible, it was shocking to me that we only saw one dead dog, freshly killed by some passing car. I wonder how many people are killed in the streets.

The street we followed turned parallel to the river—still far above it—and running along it’s edge was a park-like area, with men playing Mahjong, and dance lessons happening, and a fenced in field for gate ball, some sort of game similar to croquet. We followed it as far as we could, enjoying the view, watching the birds, watching the people. The road meandered back up the hill into a busy area with lots of shops, and a large indoor but open-air market, crowded with fruits and vegetables and meat.

All throught the day, we attracted lots of attention. It’s an odd thing to be completely unable to communicate with people, to have no common language. In all the other places I’ve been, at least the alphabet was common, and I could do my best to try and speak. Here, I have no real hope of being literate and I know just a couple of useful words. Still, everyone has been extremely gracious. The way we’re watched makes me think that there is still not a lot of tourism here, so the sight of non-Chinese people is still a bit of an oddity.

And then there are the children.

There seem to be a great deal of kids here. I guess it’s not that surprising—even with a one-child rule, a city of 2.5 million will have a lot of kids. It’s been really fun to watch them. As we made our way back to the hotel yesterday we were followed by a trio of kids, laughing and excited. We tried to talk to them, but with our only real words in common being hello, goodbye, and thank you, we didn’t really get to far.

We have about 36 hours now until we get Signe. I expect we’ll spend some more time exploring the city, but to a large degree it’s just an attempt to pass the time.

In our room, the empty crib awaits it’s passenger.

Next: Gotcha Day

- posted 7 November 2004 in blog Favorites

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