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(28 September)
If I had thought Xi'an was different, it was absolutely NOTHING on what was to come. It was like we had entered a completely different world. We thought people stared before...here, everyone stared/followed/shouted hello. The bus station wasn't too bad, clean, and the bus was ok, except for the girl munching chicken feet across the aisle from me, the weird kung Fu movies playing for the five hours, and the incessant horn beeping! Like even when you couldn't see other cars on the road! Mental. Read a book kimberly had finished called "something blue", which is the follow up to the book from the movie "something borrowed". It was pretty good! Might try and get another book off someone!
It was quite misty on the bus so couldn't see an awful lot. Chongqing is apparently one of the biggest cities in the world, with over 30 million people... A lot of this is due to the dam which displaced millions if people when water got redirected over their towns. The towns we did see on the way to the boat were really run down, I've never seem anything like it. Proper culture shock like, just when I thought I was getting used to china! When the bus stopped I just couldn't keep my mouth closed! There were very obviously poor people here. I was staring almost as much ad they were I think. We piled into the smallest vans, with no suspension, obv no seatbelts (like the whole of china) and some of the seats just stools on the floor! (I took a picture!). This town was nothing like anything else id seen so far. Then we went and found our boat, which is kind of a "cruise ship" (I use this term loosely as it is definitely not a les-type cruise haha!) for about 100 people maybe, all Chinese except us of course. It's not too bad, clean! There was a memorable moment walking to it when we walked past this little girl, maybe 4 or 5, standing in the middle of all these prawns or something like that on the floor, with a broom in her hand! I wish I'd stopped to take a photo, it was actually one of the most bizarre things I've ever seen!
So we had showers on the boat (I'm sharing with kimberly this time which is nice). Was pretty interesting, really small and the lights all went off in the middle oft shower haha, then we went back into the town for food. It was actually really nice, and Jenny explained a bit about where we are going, along the Yangtze river and the three gorges. Afterwards we went back to the boat and learnt the basics of playing mahjong, which was really fun! Starting to get the look of Chinese numbers too. Then we played cards for a bit and had a beer (I'm starting to not mind beer, mental! Probs just the Chinese light stuff though). That was nice just to chill out a bit, then we hit bed!
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Andy Campbell I did a presentation on the old three gorges dam in first year...pretty impressive!