Day 27-29, Chongqing

Chongqing, just 4 hours by bus away from Chengdu is very industrial and huge city.

The main reason why we had to stay there longer than planned was our visa expiration, which had to be prolonged as soon as possible. Our hotel's employers helped us to find the right place to do it, but we found that this procedure is more biurocratical and time consuming in China than it was in Italy. It required 5 working days to get visa's extension done and plus different documents that weren't required in Italy. A very strict man that was responsible for the documents acceptance, with a name Liulin, was checking our documents for a very long time after what he said that we will get our visa extended. On Liulin's table there was a device used for rating an employer for his performance (in China almost every office and bank has such) with ratings ranging from excellent to very bad. After employer is done with you can express your opinion about him by pressing the button corresponding his performance. Unfortunately we didn't have a chance to evaluate Liulin's performance, he did it all by himself by choosing "excellent" after accepting my and after Andrejs' documents :)

We were very lucky with our hostel, not only we had a great cheap room there, but also hotel's staff was very helpful arranging for us different trips to see area around and organizing parties in the evenings with some free beer and cakes.

Parties were organized for people who had birthday this day, and it was great that those days there were 3 tourists having birthday. During those parties I learned many new games to play. Some of them were really awesome and funny.
Some pictures from Chongqing

The cuisine of Sichuan province has a reputation of being very spicy, however many dishes are not spicy at all.
Street food.














You can choose the ingredients for your meal and cook will turn it into something very tasty!
The most common way to eat in China is to order many dishes and then share it between each other, taking pieces of each dish and mixing it with the rise.














Since we liked very much Chinese opera performance in Chengdu, we thought of going to opera in Chongqing. We didn't meet any opera buildings on our way, but instead we saw a theater which we decided to try out too. The theater called Bayu, was a new and built as far as I understood specifically for one piece. I've never seen so many special effects in the theater including laser show, impressive decorations and waterfall with the real water.
Some pictures from the theater

In Chongqing we went to explore the city by subway which most of the time goes not under ground, but on the special bridge rails above the city which allows to have a good view of the city from the top. Since it was recently built the subway is very modern.

We also found a cool place to hang out in. It's a bit disappointing but I still have no idea how this place was called, but most of the time in Chongqing we spent there. When we didn't know how to explain the taxi driver this place, we just showed him a picture of this place we took with the camera. In general in Chinese cities we travel by taxi, cause it is so cheap there that it would be too bad not to use it. To explain the driver the direction you can try to pronounce the name of the place, but even if you know how to spell it, more likely he won't understand you, cause you need also to use intonations, which are very confusing. So what we do, we either show him the pictures in the travel book or in our camera or in the worse case call somebody from the hostel and ask to explain the driver what we want. Usually at least one of those things works. This place where we used to hang out consisted of many small restaurants, shops, it also had Starbucks and some other western fast food restaurants.

This place in the day time














And in the night