Oh boy. This is gonna be a long post.
So. One of my priorities on this holiday was to see a little more of the city, and on Saturday my roommate Bridget and I went with our Chinese friend, Paul, to visit Jiefangbei, Chongqing’s central district, for a little shopping and sightseeing. Being a holiday weekend, we were expecting crowds, so we caught an early bus. When we arrived in the downtown core, most of the stores still hadn’t opened, so we wandered the streets a bit and ended up in a large open square full of people and vendors hawking all kinds of goods. Several people handed us flyers advertising bus tours to several tourist attractions in Chongqing, and although I’m generally not a tourist attraction kind of person, it seemed like a fun and spontaneous way to spend the afternoon and get the touristy stuff out of the way, so we decided to go with one that hit three or four different spots in six hours for 50 Yuan (about $8.50) per person.
We told the guy we were interested and he led us out of the square and down a busy street to a parking lot full of bored-looking people to wait for the bus. In typical Chinese fashion, they didn’t give us any information about when the tour started or how to pay, and nobody else seemed to know, either. We asked around and eventually someone informed us that we had to pay at the tour company office, which we’d passed just up the street, so we doubled back, gave them our money, and returned to the parking lot to wait some more. Twenty minutes later there was still no bus, so Paul went asking around again. He started talking to a woman who turned out to be the tour guide, a very bad-tempered looking lady who talked very fast and very loud until people started crowding around them. He eventually came back to tell us that, due to the legal risks, the tour wouldn’t take foreigners. We went back to the office to get our money back and there was another loud, fast conversation which I couldn’t follow save for frequent utterances of “laowai”; foreigner. Across the street was another tour company, so we went there instead. Originally we were turned away there, too, but something must have changed their mind, because we were informed that if we came back at 12:30 we’d be able to go on a tour.
Somehow, in the confusion, we’d gotten hooked up with a Chinese family who seemed to want to hang out with us, and we still had two hours to kill before the tour started, so they took charge and marched us through the various nearby tourist spots. We took pictures in the square, sped through a museum of famous Chinese historical figures, and took a half-hour boat cruise a few hundred metres down the Yangzi river and back. We returned to the tour company office at 12:30 and, after more shouting and confusion, they must have told us that the bus would pick us up somewhere else, because the family whisked us out of the office and took us down the street. We walked for a good 20 minutes or more before flagging down a seemingly random bus as it passed by. And that, apparently, is how bus tours work in China.
The bus was hot and crowded, and, after getting up so early and having such a strange morning, I was exhausted and quickly fell asleep in my seat. I was immediately woken up by screeching voices and Chinese music punctuated by a laugh track; they’d put a comedy tape on the TV at the front of the bus and were apparently playing it at full volume for the comfort and amusement of their guests.
I drifted in and out of sleep all the way to the first destination, a quaint old-fashioned Chinese village called Ciqikou (tseh-chee-ko). The tour guide told us to be back in 45 minutes and we headed to the main gate of the village, where we were funnelled into the dense stream of people that swelled into the narrow lanes and alleys of the village. With bodies pressed against us on all sides, we were swept along in the river of tourists, helpless to stop and look at anything. Once in a while the crowd would shout and flatten against the walls as an overflowing garbage cart bristling with discarded meat skewers would rumble through, taking up nearly the entire alley. A couple of times we managed to break out of the crush and duck into a less-crowded shop to take a breather and quickly peruse the goods before resuming our slow shuffle toward the exit. By the time we made it back to the bus we were 20 minutes late and about half of the people still hadn’t come back, so we hung around the main gate eating whatever snacks we’d managed to buy in the village.
Eventually, when everyone was safely back on the bus, we set off about an hour behind schedule for our second destination. Once again, I quickly fell asleep to the sound of the screeching Chinese variety show. When I woke up, we were in gridlock traffic, slowly cooking under the hot Chongqing sun. When it became clear that we weren’t going to get any further, they opened the doors and we all got out of the bus to walk the last kilometre or so to our destination, which I think was some kind of scenic natural spot – I never actually found out. When we finally got there, we took one look at the front gate and decided not to bother; it was clogged with even more bodies than Ciqikou. We bought some snacks from the street vendors in the parking lot, checked out a couple of tacky tourist shops, got photographed with some amused locals, and waited for the braver people to return before turning around and walking back to the bus.
By the time we were ready to leave the second destination it was clear that the tour was over. We crawled back to Jiefangbei to the sound of the comedy tape and the apologies of the tour guide and got downtown just in time to catch one of the last buses back to campus. So, in the end, I may not have seen much in the way of quaint villages and local scenery, but the cultural experience was a hell of a lot more authentic than any tourist attraction.
Chinese word of the day:
拥挤
yōngjǐ
Crowded
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