Xinjiang Trip Day 29 (17-4-2007)
I slept until fairly late but when I finally woke up I found it was a beautiful day. Chongqing is famously polluted and has only a handful of clear days a year. The storm had blown all the pollution away and so today was one of those rare days.
I visited the small Flying Tigers museum, and then General Stillwell’s Residence. Both were interesting and had extensive displays in English. The General Stillwell Residence was built in an unusually modern style for China at that time. An American couple were being shown around the house by a local guide who was telling them far more about China’s growing economy than General Stillwell. They asked a question about the museum, and got an anecdotes about how many mobile phones her family now owned in response. I bought an interesting T-shirt based on the patch that the Flying Tigers wore on the back of their jackets. The T-shirt had the ROC flag on it (i.e. the current Taiwanese flag) and Chinese script explaining that the foreigner wearing the jacket was an American who had come to help the war effort, and that all patriots should provide him with protection, medical care, food and other assistance.
In the afternoon I went out to Chiang Kai-shek’s official residence at Nanshan, also the site of the Flying Tigers command and training centers. The residences were set in a large hilly park on the south side of the river outside central Chongqing. The buildings on the site were all in more or less the same style and I guess they were all commissioned together. The so called ‘museum’ of the anti-Japanese war located on the site was more or less an empty room. The park was full of staff members relaxing around outside tables sipping tea and playing cards and Majong.
Back in town I took a cable car (索道) ride across the river. By late afternoon the pollution was starting to come back but the views of central Chongqing were stil quite dramatic.
After the cable car ride I saw a sign advertising an ‘Erotic Street’ and went to investigate.
The Chinese on the sign hadn’t said ‘erotic’, and so I wasn’t surprised to find the ‘erotic street’ was merely a tourist market selling handicrafts and local snacks. I think the word the translator was really looking for had been ‘exotic’. Of course even ‘exotic’ was a slightly odd description of a fairly run of the mill market, but then the Chinese have a weakness for hyperbolic nomenclature.
Taxi drivers I had asked about what there was to do in Chongqing had kept suggesting I check out a place called Yangrenjie (literally ‘westerner street’). At least one of them had given me the impression it was some kind of a bar street. I decided to go and check it out in the evening. The driver mentioned that he wasn’t certain it would actually be open be we could go and take a look if I really wanted. I should have listened to him. Yangrenjie turned out to be located miles out of town, and as he warned it was deserted when we arrived. It was a sort of cheesy architectural theme park, with miniature Eiffel towers, ‘crazy’ log cabins turned upside down, and so on. To add to the exotic atmosphere, within the park cars were apparently required to drive on the left rather than the right – opposite to the normal practice in China. It was all a bit silly though perhaps in the day time it would have made a nice picnic spot. The driver did his best to make it interesting but there was no point in hanging around and so I had him take me home.
