Monday, May 22, 2006

may 22, 2006 (updated)

WHOAH, ok, it's been a long time since i've had access to the internet or to a phone! sorry to any of you who have e-mailed me recently... i'll try to reply asap (probably not today though). i'm sitting in my chinese friend's friend's dorm room right now. it's crazy, they have 5 ppl living in this one room :P anyways, lots of stuff has happened in the past week.. so i'll try to sum it up real quick right now.

Wednesday may 17, 2006
ok, so we travel for 5 hours from Wuhan to Yichang. but i think i'm getting used to the long bus rides now.. it didn't feel long at all. We visited a sturgeon "zoo" which was amazing. these stugeons can get up to 3 metres long!!! just imagine fishes that are MASSIVE. wow. they live in the yangtze river. anyways we got to see a live one which was pretty cool. we got back to the hotel and i had to do my seminar. i was a bit nervous, but luckily, i had already learned about what i was going to talk about in my seminar in a lecture last term.. so it went pretty good. after the seminar, i felt so good. so me and a bunch of other ppl went out for a drink and a snack... and man this area was so sketchy. we walked down the street and there were all these "hair salons" still open... and these stores had bright pink fluorescent lights eminating from them... with lots of girls just waiting around... haha. it was pretty sketchy. we ended up going to a restaurant. amy and jerry ordered a turtle to eat. it was actually pretty gross looking, but they said it tasted like chicken. oh, and to add to that... we got back to our rooms, and then our room got a phone call with a woman on the other line... but we couldn't understand anything 'cause neither of us speak chinese. haha..um, ya, i'll leave it at that.

Thursday may 18
- we did some surveys in Yichang.. just around the city... asking ppl what they thought the benefits and negative effects were of the Three Gorges Dam. then we visited the 3 gorges dam, which was amazing! man it's huge. we got to go up to the top of the dam too.. so we got a really good view of everything. after that, we got on our cruise at around 8 pm.. had dinner, then went to the top deck and just chilled there for a while.

Friday, may 19
- we got on a cruise boat the night before. today, we went to the 2nd gorge along the yangtze river. after the 2nd gorge, we got off the boat and got on a smaller one... and we toured the mini gorges.. and those were BEAUTIFUL. i took like 50 pictures... and then we got off to see this temple. we climbed all the way to the top of the mountain to get to this temple, and there wasn't really anything special about it. but the cool thing was that we found a waterfall to the right of the temple. so me and some other ppl trecked thru the woods to get there .. and it was so amazing... we stood at the base of the waterfall, and i could have stayed there for hours..but we had to rush back 'cause we were already late for our boat.. ahh i gotta post pics..
- at night, the cruise boat stopped at another tourist site. i can't remember the name of this place.. but it was something like "the white temple"... nothing too special about it. we just walked up a ton of stairs and got to see a pretty good view of the gorges. the thing i don't like with all these temples is that they're all reconstructed (e.g. re-made) because they were all destroyed during the cultural revolution. so, they don't look or feel as real... and the environment just feels like it's a tourist attraction because everywhere you go, people are trying to sell you things. you can't walk 5 minutes without someone getting into your face and nagging you to buy their stuff. even in the temples, there's tons of souvenir stores.

Saturday
- went to Fengdu (or Fongdu) and we were supposed to do surveys there as well. but when we got there, we found out they were doing tons of construction on the roads to get ready for the rising of the water level of the yangtze river. um... just to explain that a bit, one of the reasons why they built the three gorges dam was to generate hydroelectricity... and to get more power, you need more water passing thru the turbines. so they're raising the water level in the upstream regions of the yangtze to accomodate this. and since the water level is rising, many cities have to relocate to higher regions int he mountains... and Fengdu was one of these cities. they've already reaised the water level by a lot. for example, at the surface of the river, you can see the tops of bridges that used to connect the mountains together... right now, they're destroying bridges and building higher ones because the water level is supposed to go up another 25-30 m by august.

Sunday

- finally done the 3night/4 day cruise and we got to Chongqing. this city is massive... 32 million ppl in this place. dang. bigger than the population of all of canada. anyways, today was fun. this place eats super spicy food. at lunch, we went to this pretty fancy restaurant. i sat with the profs, so we the restaurant gave us a better lunch than everyone else. we drank this white wine that yuxiang calls "jet fuel".
- at dinner, we had hotpot.. authentic hotpot. and ... when i saw the hot pot, i almost peed in my pants. It looked like super hot, red bubbling lava... with some hot peppers and peppercorns floating on it... seriously, it was crazy. we had a bunch of raw stuff on our table (brain, intestines, kidneys, beef, fish, etc), and it was funny.. luke was like, "will, i've eaten everything on this trip.. but i think this is the first time i won't be able to try it". he thought that we just dipped the raw food into the hot stuff and ate it raw.

Monday
- in the morning, we had a long lecture by one of the profs here at southwestern university. then we had lunch with the vice-principal of the university and some other university heads (which was pretty neat). after that, went to a water treatment plant, the national history museum here in CQ, and then we went to speak to some fishermen.
- at night, we had an iron chef competition. it was really fun. we used a real restaurant kitchen. the stoves are crazy! they're not like our stoves in canada.... they're just big holes in the counter with gas coming out of them.. so when they're lit on fire, they sound like a jet engine. and they literally look like the back of the batmobile... they put a massive wok on top of it .. and yeah, it was cool. i cooked on it!! hahah. it was scary though... i was scared i would burn my face off. yeah, so they gave us our special ingredients we needed to cook with.. and my group was against luke and jenna's group. it was actually really fun.. all of us had a really good time.

Tuesday
- went to see the Baoding rock carvings. that was pretty neat. it was basically this canyon where there's tons of rock carvings.. pretty neat. after that, visited a fish farm that used hot springs as their water source to harvest tropical fish.

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