Little Hong Kong Isn't So Little.

Before this post how many of you had heard of Chongqing? Exactly. Believe it or not, it is poised to become one of the largest cities in China with over 30 million people. The city center, which is a long peninsula between two rivers, one of them the third largest in the world, the Yangtze, resembles Manhattan and is home to 4 million people.



Chongqing rivals Beijing for the most polluted city in China. As you can see from these pictures, the skyline is impressive, but it is hidden in a cloud of dust and pollution. To be fair, the southwest is in the middle of a horrible drought, so dust just hangs in the air, but a lot of this is pollution because Chongqing is in a mountainous region. The city was much more vibrant and energetic than Chengdu, it has a great vibe, a lot of wide sidewalks and neat plazas surrounded by skyscrapers, so it felt like a major metropolitan city. It is known as Little Hong Kong because of the skyline hugging water with mountains in the background, and probably also because it seems to be a lively city, more so than many in western China.

There was one free morning in Chongqing, so before the school visit a few of us decided to walk a half mile through the city center to a Buddhist temple tucked right in the middle of the city. It would be like stumbling on a 1,000 year old temple in Midtown Manhattan or off Michigan Avenue in Chicago. Where old China meets new China.



The Arhat Temple is a Buddhist temple and monastery, and it was so quiet and relaxing inside. We really felt like we were in China hundreds or thousands of years ago. Not a bad way to start the day. After that we got back to the hotel, changed, and headed out to our visit that day, a national Chinese school, Chongqing Second Foreign Language School. This visit was a showcase, the school had an entire delegation for us because it was the first time a group of U.S. universities had visited the school (one of the best secondary schools in the province). There were students waiting for us with signs (each of us had two student guides):



And the school grounds were beautiful, the school was on a steep hillside with some nice views of the surrounding hillsides.


That concludes the highlights from Chongqing - we did have a lot of fun, ate some great food, had some drinks, saw some sights, and visited some schools...a pretty balanced stop in Little Hong Kong.