Wansheng Stone Forest

We thoroughly enjoyed our trip out to the Wansheng Stone Forest 万盛石林 (2-3 hrs outside of Chongqing city) at the tail end of summer just over a month ago. It was getting just cool enough to not completely melt while we hiked up the endless stairs (typical of a Chinese natural attraction) and through the stone forest. As far as things to do in and around Chongqing, this is definitely worth the 2-3 hour trip. This stone forest is older than Yunnan's Lunan Stone Forest, having formed approx. 465 million years ago. That's right, million. We were lucky to go with a lovely host that packed up a fancy picnic for us to enjoy at the end of the hike. You will notice there is a slide/luge as you hike up the mountain to the stone forest, on your way back down - go ahead and SLIDE the rest of the way. Touristy/gimmicky, that it is, it is pure fun if you are lucky enough to not be crowded down the slide and adventurous enough to pick up your feet and let the slide take you down nice and fast.

Lotus Love

We stumbled upon a lotus farm while out on a fruit picking adventure this week. It just so happens I am writing about the lotus plant/flower and all it's medicinal virtues (from it's seeds to it's root) this week. It was a real find to get these pictures! Enjoy.

It's Been a While and the Year of the Snake is coming...

Apologies for the delay in getting back on here for an update in some months. We are well settled into our life in Chongqing after a year and a half and loving it though S works more hours than he ever has and rarely does he have a moment to explore, let alone relax. I bring the adventures in to our home often though! Recently, making homemade Chinese New Year sausages which can be seen hanging all over the city now as we are only a week away from ushering in the Year of the Snake. Our lovely and kind shifu Jiang shared his family recipe with us after we devoured what he gave us last year from his family stash. These are filled with Sichuan peppercorns and are meant to be steamed, sliced, and eaten whilst drinking cool beer to temper the fun tingling sensation from the Hua Jiao (Sichuan peppercorns) which is an herb/spice meant to battle the effects of the damp weather here. If you want to see more pictures and a recipe go here to my work fan page on facebook : Chinese New Year Sausage recipe and pictures.

Chongqing continues to amaze, inspire, and grow on us.

Weekend Hiking

Jin Yun Shan, BeiBei, Chongqing.

Plum season, weighing in on an old school jin scale.

So many beautiful caterpillars on our hike up the mountain.

Gourds are here, Fall is around the corner...

Recently...

(vegetable name alludes me but it's usually served as a cold salad...)

(ridiculously delicious garlic, sweeter than the cloved one)

(pickled garlic pao cai, mmm....)

(Yun Dou Gao, "ironed" cakes made from rice flour, DELECTABLE)

(egg stand with duck, goose, chicken, and quail eggs - fresh or in pi dan or yan dan form - cured or salted)

Strolling Through Lao Chongqing

(underground world of farms)

Walking through old (lao) Chongqing helps you to imagine what it was like when it was the wartime capital during WWII. We took a long hike/stroll (lots of steep stairs) from the Cai Yuan Ba (i.e. Coral Park) up to Pi Pa Shan Gong Yuan , then down to the People's Court and the 3 Gorges Museum. It was a bright breezy and sunny day in Chongqing. Nothing like it. Yesterday was much the same, and we had a two hour adventure riding our bikes from Chongqing Tiandi towards Jiefangbei, under the highway where there is a whole world of people living (the ones who are building this city!), with farms, chickens, ducks, and more.

(abandoned boat, now a makeshift home)

(beautiful fresh bamboo shoots in a vegetable market by the highway)

(lady selling dried Chinese Medicine herbs)

(street side old school dentistry)

(bai jiu - fermented rice wine - alcohol store)

(old school cupping using bamboo cups for lower back pain, smoking a cigarette while doing it)

Sichuan Style Pickles

New pickling device for Sichuan pao cai. Pickles just got a whole lot more interesting!

The pickling characters. The green one is qing cai tou (green head vegetable). Jiao Tou (the white scallion looking one in the yellow strainer). Fresh chiles, ginger ...

Time Flying by in China

(Mao statue in Chengdu, home of the cuddly panda's, 2 hrs. northwest of Chongqing)

We've already been here almost 6 months! Time is zipping past too quickly, we are learning something every day, have met great people, had amazing experiences, and the list goes on. We've also been traveling quite a bit : Australia, Thailand, Hong Kong, Thailand, Chengdu and soon, Chicago. After that, Bangkok again (there are now direct flights on Air Asia starting end of March - Chongqing is becoming HOT and happening, eh!).

(Dazu Rock carvings temple)


I've started Chinese lessons, not just with a private tutor to work on translating Chinese Medical cook books into English, but in a university level class 4 hours a day every morning. I practice as much as I can and the opportunity lends itself often as not many Chongqing locals speak fluent English. Lucky for me! Often I get a crowd surrounding me to hear me mispronounce and stumble through my kindergarten level grammar, c'est la vie! You have to be willing to be a spectacle if you want to practice.

Here are some of the latest snippets....

(Flying kites in Chaotianmen, Chongqing's old port)

(Tea drinking and ceremony. Am obsessed with this now! Get ready for me to pull out the tea tricks..)

(Lovely presentation for us for our anniversary at Brilliant Spa & Resort in BeiBei hot springs)

(We've been having lots of teppanyaki... this is a fancy one at Brilliant Resort & Spa)

(Hello Hong Kong! Lived there in 1982-83 and boy has it changed. The best of somewhere like NYC + Asia = I love it there)

Dragon Time

Chinese New Year rapidly approaches and we will be celebrating the Eve (on Sunday the 23rd) with a whole bunch of friends and a feast that includes all the symbolic dishes to usher in the New Year. The city is lit up in red, with dragons (for this is the year of the water dragon), fish, and lights galore. We even have a dragon hanging in our living room window, and fish to welcome our guests in on the coat hangar. And our Buddha statue is receiving offerings every day .... though this is just a cross section of my having grown up in Thailand (a little tam boon never hurt anyone) and currently living in China. In China they practice Mahayana Buddhism though it is only 100 million out of the 1.3+ billion that practice it and rarely do you meet a practicing Buddhist in the city (especially post Cultural Revolution which promoted atheism). In any case, this is how we're doing it at our house, we are a big ol' mix of everything in here. I'll post pictures of the feast next week.. in the meantime, Happy 2012 and soon to be Happy Year of the Dragon!

A Changing China

I love China (in fact, I should say we love China, as S does, too). But sometimes it's painful to love China as vast amounts of it's history and cultural heritage in the way of ancient (and I mean ANCIENT as in B.C.!) buildings and neighborhoods, temples, mountains, and rivers are being gobbled up by the insane development it's in the midst of. Development is inevitable, but the way that one goes about it, is not. First let me share the following particularly illuminating Communist Party slogan :

"Build the City, Construct the Roads, Renovate the Mountains, Harness the Rivers."
(taken from p. 42 of "Factory Girls", by Leslie T. Chang - highly recommend this book if you want to know where virtually everything you ever bought that says "made in China" was made, and more importantly by whom.)

(the Lesser Three Gorges, imagine 90 meters less water in this river)

All of that is good and fine, except it creeps into places that I think will have long lasting and detrimental effects. For example : the Three Gorges Dam (the worlds largest hydro-electric dam for those that don't know). Yes, it's enabled China to harness enough electricity to continue to provide to it's ever growing population.

(one of many new bridges, this is a pretty red one)

Problem is, it flooded over 1 million long time residents (as in people who came from a lineage of 1,000+ years) out of their homes and thousands of villages that were sometimes up to 2,000 yrs. old were completely covered in water, never to be seen again. The river now is 90 meters above where it was. 90 METERS!!!!!! And it goes up and down up to 30 meters every year. What does this do to the limestone (soft and porous) rock that is on the spectacular mountains surrounding the river along it's gorges? They are starting to crumble.

(limestone up close)

(a mountain peak named after the Bodhisattva Guan Yin, representative of compassion)

There is some potentially bright news to this all, National Geographic had an interesting take on it, see it here. But otherwise, it's a bit sad. Mainly because the new towns and cities are not so pretty, they're generic, bland, grey, concrete, the only charm that comes is from the people making it their own in whatever way they can. Yes, many of them are happy that they are living in improved accommodations. No, living in a thousand year old stone house isn't always fun in the winter, sans plumping, electricity, and adequate facilities. But why didn't they knock down all of the "old" buildings in Paris? Because then it's not Paris. It's just another city. AnywhereCity.

(one of many landslides, this one killed a whole lot of people - don't know the numbers as they weren't provided - on a boat that was passing by at the wrong time)

When I lived in Beijing the hutongs were at risk too. Luckily some are being preserved because there are a few people out there that are smart enough to have the foresight that the hutongs make Beijing. It also makes us all a little closer and more connected versus stuck in a nondescript high rise, not knowing our neighbors, not knowing our corner store guy, and for our guests coming to visit us - not being able to find us! (trust me this happens, all the time in China). I don't think I'm being an idealist here. The elderly in China are the ones feeling it the most, as their structural community has been pulled from under them. They are finding themselves lonely, lost. That is heart breaking. Architecture was not built for profit only before, it had a thoughtful sense for social interactions. Now it's cheap, it's tall, and it's for the most part, ugly.

(Chaotianmen, old port area of Chongqing)

This has all gotten to me as of late since hearing that a beautiful part of Chongqing, Chaotianmen (the old port area), built in approx. 400 B.C. (!!) is going to be completely knocked down and they are going to build this monster. You will see the inevitable mark of death on buildings, in red, the Chinese character for "knock it" aka. demolish, chai... 拆. It is written everywhere. The knocking down has begun, Chaotianmen's days are numbered.

(sweeping the streets of Chaotianmen, to the left, a demolished building)

(some young guys having fun taking a picture of something random, and behind them if you look really close you can see the Chinese character for demolish in red)

(building to the right was being demolished by 5 construction workers, piece by piece, as I took this picture)

I've been asking many locals what they think of this as I was concerned that it is my purely Western idealistic mind wanting to keep China "quaint" that was saddened about the so called progress, and for the most part the response I get is no different from mine: it is sad. They are losing their history. But they are more practical about it, what can you do? Money is too powerful, and in a sense it is about money (the developers are the new ruling class here). I also learned that there are up to 100,000 riots and protests a year in China, mostly about land (or about labor). Having said all this, I don't think that this issue is endemic to China, it is a worldwide issue. We all play a part in it.

(empty buildings, ready to be knocked down)

(strolling past the already shuttered stores of closed buildings)

I did hear one amazing story about the so called "nail house" as it was being referred to back in 2007 here in Chongqing. Developers were building another enormous mall after knocking down an old part of Chongqing and there was one couple who refused to move out of their house that had been handed down generation after generation. They held fast for 3 long years, becoming the ONLY house in the middle of a large pit while construction went on all around them. Finally, in 2007 they succumbed to the developers and probably got a decent deal out of it, but it makes me smile to know that one couple managed to hold on for that long in the face of such insanity all around them! It's worth reading the story, go here.

If you want to see what's left of China, you better come quick before it becomes one big strip mall.