The following blog post features student writing.

Today was pretty much dedicated to travel—after breakfast, we got onto the bus and drove back to Chengdu (specifically the eastern train station). We were about an hour and a half early, so we explored the station and grabbed some snacks—including our first Western food since getting to China: KFC! It apparently tasted different than the KFC in America, even though I hadn’t ever had it before (Kishan has had it before, and he agrees).

The train, once we embarked, was incredibly fast, probably at least a hundred-something miles per hour. It only took a few hours to get to Chongqing from Chengdu. Along the way we were able to see some of the Chinese countryside (as well as cities and towns). There was a good amount of farmland and some traditional rural houses that were far from anything we had seen so far in the urban centers we’ve visited, as well as a decent amount of overgrown infrastructure—we saw a lot of simple concrete walls or three-wall-cubicles that were abandoned and overgrown with vines and other plants. Often the reclaimed and abandoned sections were placed right next to brand new apartment buildings or houses. It seemed like developers just build new things instead of renovating the old.

After the train ride, we boarded another bus, this one with a different guide, named Richard. We went to a museum dedicated to the Three Gorges and the dam built between them, where we were given time to explore. When we finished at the museum, we bussed to Chiang Kai-shek’s villa that he owned in the heights of Chongqing. (For those who don’t know, Chiang Kai-shek was the generalissimo of the provisional republic government that fought in the civil war against Mao after he deposed Sun Yat-sen, the previous leader of the republic after the Qing dynasty.) His house was quite small, but the grounds around it were nice: there was a pagoda with an excellent view of the whole city and a man had set up his cart where he was painting people’s names, both in English and in Chinese, in a stylized fashion with dragons and bamboo trees and other various animals representing different strokes and letters. Many of us bought our Chinese names in the style.

We then went to a local grocery store where we bought snacks, before driving on the bus again to dinner. The food was less spicy than in Chengdu and there weren’t the classic staples of Mapo doufu and twice-cooked pork that we had come to expect, but it was good nonetheless. When dinner was over, we walked across the street to the boat docks, where we checked into our rooms, unloaded a bit of our luggage into the fairly small space we had (but really, it’s a boat, what are you expecting?) and met up on the top deck. We talked for a bit, discussed our plans for the next day, and watched as we set off from port out onto the river. When we exited the city, we decided it was time to sleep.