Dear everyone,
My internet has been intermittent (in fact, this is the first time I've been online since arriving in Chongqing), so here are some blogs I wrote earlier and was unable to post:

April 9, 2008
Welcome to Chongqing!

Our days in Chengdu are over. Yesterday we got on a bus for about 5 hours to get to our second city in China, Chongqing. From what we had been told, Chongqing is a mountainous city, similar to San Francisco. It is also the most populated city in the world, with 30 million people.

The bus ride was uneventful, for the most part. We each got our own row, so we were able to stretch out (a bit) and sleep for much of the ride, which was definitely needed! Unfortunately, the bus emitted an annoying beeping noise every few seconds, which we think was some kind of speed and gas monitor, and which can be turned off, but wasn't. Also, the bus driver highly enjoyed honking whenever we passed another vehicle on the road, which was often. Sleep was difficult.

We had a rest stop about halfway through, and most of us got off the bus to use the facilities, as they say, and buy things in the little inconvenience store. I bought some milk tea and some potato chips, which were quite good.

I got back on the bus, and the bus suddenly started moving! Not everyone was back on the bus - in fact - we were missing quite a few people. Someone went to the front of the bus to stop the driver, and everyone looked for roommates and buddies, trying to figure out who was gone. This driver really wanted to get out of there, regardless of leaving people behind. Finally, we had everyone back on the bus, and we proceeded to our destination.

We got to Chongqing and the bus stopped at the side of the highway. We didn't get off, but the company manager (who had been traveling on the other bus) got onto our bus and told us that we were waiting for a police escort into the city! We waited for a while, and finally a number of regular cars marked with "The Sound of Music" on the side joined us and followed us into the city.

When our caravan pulled up to the beautiful Marriott hotel, we were greeted by a horde of schoolgirls holding flower bouquets for us, as well as press photographers and videographers. I had not been on the bus with the kids, who had gotten off first, so I sort of tried to scoot past the people (smiling nicely all the time) and go into the hotel -- how does one walk up to a schoolgirl and take her flowers when not with the group the kids? -- but the moms stopped me, and pointed at me, and made it obvious (and easier for me) that I was one of the "kids" and was supposed to receive flowers. So I did, and it was cute!

Our new hotel is beautiful. I was in a weird mood when we got here last night, and promptly tried to rearrange the furniture. The room is big enough for two, but it is absolutely packed with lovely and unnecessary furniture! There is a loveseat, an armchair, a desk, a coffee table, a little bar table, a TV console ... we don't need all that! I was moving furniture like my life depended on it, trying to figure out how to fit all of our luggage into nooks and crannies so it doesn't take up too much space and fall out all over the middle of the room.

The perks: beautiful room, really comfortable beds, climate control, incredible bathroom with a separate tub and shower.

The cons: internet costs a huge amount of money, per hour, per day, or per week. Don't expect to find me online much this week! I guess when we stay in a fancy hotel, we pay. Too much furniture in the room ... the fridge is stacked with food (which we are charged for, if we eat it, of course, so we don't want to), we can't hang laundry in the window, windows don't open, and everything is expensive expensive expensive!

We often ordered room service in the Garden City Hotel (Chengdu) because it was so cheap -- about $3.50 for a club sandwich and fries, burger and fries, and so on. Room service here costs the same as room service in America, because yes, this is an American hotel! We often ate in the restaurant in the Chengdu hotel and a burger was about $4.50. I ate in the hotel restaurant last night, after the press conference, and my burger was about $11! This included a 15% service charge.

So ... lesson learned: the nicest hotels are not necessarily the easiest to deal with! I'm now grateful for all that we had in Chengdu, even though our hotel rooms weren't great. We had a Carrefour (like Walmart) right next door, as well as a Starbucks! There were a lot of cheap food options right in the hotel. Here, I feel that I need to explore outside the hotel just to find reasonably priced food, so I don't end up spending more than my daily per diem! The biggest problem is not having internet -- I will probably wait a few days, then pay for an hour of internet and try to catch up on everything, post blogs, read emails, and so on. I'm not desperate for it, and it might be nice to be without it for a while, but boy ... it was nice when it was free!

I hope this blog doesn't sound like one big complaint. We are VERY lucky to be staying in such a beautiful hotel, and I think most of our future hotels are going to be like this one. The beds are a dream!

Last night, shortly after we arrived, we had a press conference in the hotel with Maria and the Captain, the kids, and a few other adults (Mother Abbess and Herr Zeller). The best part was the fact that the press started out with this question for the kids: "Do you think your performances in Chongqing will be better than the performances in Chengdu?" We passed the microphone down the line, and each of the kids said something like, "I'm very excited to be in Chongqing, and the city is beautiful, and I think our performances here are going to be much better than in Chengdu." At one point Anissa (Mother Abbess) turned to me and whispered, "I hope people in Chengdu don't read these newspapers!" After everyone had spoken, Radar, the company manager, took the microphone and said, "I don't know what these kids are talking about! I think the performances in Chengdu were just great, and they will continue to be great here in Chongqing -- we have the strongest cast we have ever had for this show." And so on. So perhaps that cleared things up! It was very funny though -- at the end, they had each of us say a parting remark, and again, a number of the kids revisited the "It will be better here in Chongqing" theme. So funny! How bad did they think our performances WERE in Chendgu?

Today is Christine's (Maria's) birthday! She is going to be ... er... 22. We're having a big group dinner tonight in the top floor steakhouse to celebrate her old age. HAPPY BIRTHDAY, CHRISTINE!!!

April 9, 2008 -- later

What a successful day!

I am so proud of myself (and my roommate) today. We had such an eventful day! Nobody seemed to have any plans, so Jen and I decided to go out wandering. Actually, I asked her to take me out wandering, because she had been out wandering for a bit last night (while I was at the press conference), and I wanted her to show me around a little so I could try to become more acclimated to Chongqing. The unfamiliarity, paired with the curiously hot weather we've had since coming here, was making me feel irritable and strange, so I needed to get out and see part of the city in order to become accustomed to it.

And boy, did we!

I'm probably making this out to be much more than it really is, but here is our story.

On our way out, we stopped at the front desk and asked them where the Carrefour (Walmart-like store) was. The woman told us that it is pretty far, and she wrote it down in Chinese so we could take a taxi there. We asked if we could walk, and she said no, it is about an hour's walk away from the hotel, but ten minutes in a taxi. Well, we weren't about to go there today, but we had the address for a future trip.

We headed out, and Jen took me toward the little shopping district she had found last night. We were looking for a Starbucks, not necessarily to get drinks, but just to know where one was. Jen was positive it was in this central shopping area, but we didn't see it! We darted in and out of some stores, and found a really neat-looking clothing store (sort of in the style of H&M in New York), the same store where Jen, in Chengdu, had bought a funny shirt that says: Love Life. Spread Yourself.

We looked around a bit and then decided to come back and try things on during our walk back to the hotel. We wandered around some more, ducking into more stores and little markets. We wandered through a market that seemed kind of creepy to me, but I guess it is normal for China. The stores are tiny, the size of your average bathroom, so you don't even want to go in because you start feeling claustrophobic, and if you show any interest in something -- even just touching a piece of clothing on a hanger, the salespeople will start pulling other things off the rack and showing them to you, even if they are nothing like the item that you touched. I hate salespeople that hover, even in the U.S., so I try my hardest to show absolutely NO interest in anything in these markets. The other thing that seemed strange to me was that many of the markets have cloths and veils draped over the entrances, which really made me not want to enter and get "sucked in." I actually developed a clever technique to avoid these annoying, hovering salespeople. If I'm interested in an article of clothing, I take it off the rack and hold it up to Jen (or whomever I am with). That way, I can see how it would fit and how it would look without indicating my OWN interest, but Jen can shake her head as if to say that she's not interested herself, and that way NOBODY seems interested -- but I still get to look more closely at the clothing. I know that you are applauding my brilliance right now.

We found a main sort of "town square" in this shopping area, so we decided to traverse each leg coming out of the square, in three directions (the fourth was the direction from which we had come). As we were walking down one of the legs, Jen spotted a Starbucks sign up high on the building wall, which said "40 meters ahead." Starbucks! This was not the one Jen had seen the previous night, but we decided to get a snack. By snack, I mean Iced Signature Chocolate (i.e. a cold version of their hot chocolate, which is made with dark chocolate and is extremely rich and delicious). We chatted with the woman behind the counter, who spoke English, and asked her where there were other Starbucks' -- so that we could try to figure out where was the missing one that Jen had seen earlier. She drew a little map on a business card, and showed us one in the direction from which we had come, and one even farther away, which she said was near the river. We decided to walk that way and try to see the river.

We started walking, passing little storefronts that sold food, drinks, and other goods. To me, the city and the streets seemed much dirtier and grimier than those in Chengdu, but that may have just been the area we were in. There were also fewer, or no, stoplights, so we found ourselves darting across streets through surging traffic -- especially buses, which don't stop for anything and don't obey traffic lights when lights do exist.

All of a sudden, Jen said, "Did I just see a Carrefour sign?" My heart immediately started racing. (Let me remind you, again, that Carrefour is the Walmart-like store that was right next to our hotel in Chengdu, which we fell in love with for the purchase of all sundries, from body wash to bottled water to groceries! It is the very same store that was located, according to the hotel front desk, an hour's walk away. We had not walked nearly that far!) I looked, and there it was: Carrefour! Directly in front of us! We whooped and squealed and made other sorts of cheerful noises, feeling very proud of ourselves (and lucky!), and went inside. There, we purchased more body wash, ziplock bags (for stealing food from breakfast at the hotel), a few snacks, and bottled water, since the Marriott is much stingier in bottle size than the Garden City hotel was. (The hotel gives you bottled water each day.)

Then we headed out and started walking back in the same direction, in order to visit the cute H&M-like clothing store before returning to the hotel. We tried to memorize landmarks so we'd be able to direct other people to the Carrefour, but it was quite confusing. We could get to it, but I don't know if we could tell other people how to find it without us.

On the way back, in the main square, we actually saw the original Starbucks - the one Jen had seen last night. It was RIGHT WHERE WE HAD BEEN WALKING. But the sign was above us, so unless we were walking across the square from it, we couldn't have seen it. We did not get more drinks, though.

Then we went to our clothing store: Meters/Bonwe. We spent an age in there! This is the first time I have really been shopping for fun since coming to China: I usually get bored or tired or claustrophobic from all the people around and hovering, and want to leave. But this was a normal, large-ish store, where salespeople mostly left us alone or were friendly, and we could roam free, trying things on as we wished. They had a lot of cool, loose, cottony shirts, which we both wanted to buy because the weather has already turned extremely hot, now in early April! I ended up getting 6 shirts and a little cotton dress, perfect for the warm weather coming to torment us. Jen got some capri pants that she needed, as well as some shirts (and we actually got the same shirt, so we'll have to have a twin day sometime). My total shopping expenditures, I'm embarrassed to say, were roughly equivalent to $100 US! I consider that a good deal, and I'm very excited about my new Chinese clothes.

Then we walked back to the hotel, finding a faster way to get there through a side door. We took our stuff to our room, and joined some of the kids in the swimming pool for a while before coming back to the room to get ready for Christine's fancy birthday dinner.

What fun it was!

Oh, one more thing: I thought I was so smart and clever to pack my world into one large suitcase and one smaller one, for these 8 months in China. Boy, was I not! My bags are packed to the GILLS every time we move locations, and I know I'm going to accumulate more stuff over the next months, and really, there is no need to conserve bag size. We wheel our bags from our room to the elevator, then from the elevator out to the buses and luggage truck. We don't have to lift anything. So ... my beloved medium-sized purple suitcase is probably going to be left in China. I am planning to buy a second enormous bag from Carrefour sometime this week, so that I have extra space instead of not enough space. Just like everyone else. I have learned my lesson. (And they're cheap there, too!)