Juyongguan<\/a> section – slightly off the beaten path but still filled with tourists), the Summer Palace, hutong (pluralization?), and finally the Temple of Heaven. We ate Peking duck two nights in a row and had tons of dumplings and buns – food rivaling Singapore (albeit very different).<\/p>\nI then left Beijing for Chongqing where my Yangtze River cruise was to depart. Little did I know that Chongqing is a massive city – more massive than Beijing itself (yes, I didn’t believe that either at first, but Wikipedia confirmed). The municipality has a population of more than 31 million! I met up with Becca (a friend from Wash. U.)\u00a0 and her best friend from high school, Sally, had a quick dinner, and navigated we set off to navigate our way to the cruise docks. Eventually we found our way – Sally speaking Chinese might have helped just a bit. We embarked on our cruise, filled with 9 foreigners and probably about 100 Chinese people. We thought it was a foreigner cruise, but frankly it was great and probably much more authetntic having all the “locals” aboard, even if that meant that Sally had to translate often.<\/p>\n
The cruise went through the gorgeous\u00a0Three Gorges and finally the incredible Three Gorges Dam just this morning. We saw lots of temples, delighted in a cultural show or two on board, and enjoyed all our meals with a South African couple and two couples from Holland (demonym for Holland? Hollanders?).<\/p>\n
Perhaps as a sign that this cruise wasn’t quite geared toward college kids, each morning began with breakfast at 7am; we often were exhausted by about 8pm. Apart from maybe two kids on board, we were the youngest there and stuck out like a sore thumb. Everyone loved us, particularly when we took to the dance floor for the YMCA. Throughout the journey, many made requests to take photos with Becca and\u00a0me (more Becca than\u00a0me)\u00a0– white people are like a wonder to many of the Chinese.<\/p>\n
The Three Gorges (and the lesser Three Gorges) were probably one of the most beautiful sights I have ever seen. Cavernous cliffs tower over the boat hundreds of feet into the air and lush greenery is everywhere. Almost as stark of a contrast as could be possible, the dam was one of the most incredible man-made sights I have ever seen. We arrived at the dam at 10pm last night and spent 4 hours slowly making our way through the\u00a0five locks slowly descending from 146m above sea level to 65 meters above sea level. It was so enthralling I stayed up the entire time watching the process as our ship, as well as three others trapped in with us, made it from one side of the dam to the other. When the dam is fully completed, the start will be 175m above sea level, 29 meters\u00a0higher than it currently is.<\/p>\n
I could go on and on about the history of the dam and its creation, including the more than 1 million locals that were “relocated” (a euphemism at best)\u00a0 as the dam was built and their homes were flooded, but Wikipedia would do far more justice than I.<\/p>\n
After a tour of the dam site this morning, we finished our cruise at the dock in Yichang. Right now I’m sitting at the airport in Yichang waiting for my flight to Xi’an where I’ll explore the terracotta warriors tomorrow.<\/p>\n
That’s all for now; I certainly left out tons of detail for the sake of brevity, but leave a comment here and I will happily be sure to include more in my next post!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The longest post so far, you can read all about the beginning of my trip here!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-57","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-travel"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p26wXL-V","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottbressler.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottbressler.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottbressler.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottbressler.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottbressler.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottbressler.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":61,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottbressler.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57\/revisions\/61"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottbressler.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottbressler.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottbressler.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}