Lina in China

So in the morning we were leaving the nice small city of Mianyang (only 6 Million people ) for Chongqing. I must confess I had never heard the name of this city before only to find out now that it is the largest city in whole China and even the world!

I thought he was taking me to yet another nice small town near Chengdu. Well not quite… !

When my friend told me that we will be driving for 5-6 hours in order to get to Chongqing I started to wonder.

When I saw the first thing I saw of Chongqing was the traffic. Chongqing is unbelievable chaotic. If the traffic in other Chinese scared me, the traffic in Chongqing terrified me.

Then the Skyscrapers came into my view. Chongqing is unbelievable gigantic and chaotic. It is (at least in summer) hot, humid, loud and chaotic.

My friend took me immediately to some Chinese party in some Chinese hot pot restaurant in the middle of Chongqing. It all just got too much for me. 100 strangers were introducing themselves murmuring names that I would forget the same instant.

All faces looked the same, everyone was a lawyer (must have been a lawyers party) and the Chongqing food did not look very tasty to put it nice.

Indian Food in Chongqing, Foreigener Street

Luckily the Chinese tend to be very good and caring hosts. He saw that I was totally overwhelmed by the city, by meeting 15 loud, celebrating Chinese lawyers around one pot (Chongqing hot pot, “Huguo”).

So we sneaked out and my Chongqingnese friend took me to the foreigner street. This street is a mixture of foreign restaurants and a fair with carousel and such on one of Chongqing’s many hills.

We had some very delicious Indian food: Bananas wrapped in special bread. The Indian Cook was so happy that I greeted him with “Namaste” and spoke English to him, that he gave me my portion for free.

European Coffee, finally!

Then we went to the Café de Paris and had some excellent French Coffee. We were sitting on the a second floor balcony with a beautiful view on Chongqing by night. The coffee in Chongqing’s foreigner street tasted just like at home. And the Chinese girl working in the Café de Paris at Foreigner Street in Chongqing even spoke some French! Unfortunately her French boss was not home.

So Chongqing greeted me with some foreign specialities that I had been longing for for a long time.

Tags: Cafe, Chongqing, Coffee House, European Coffee, Foreigener Street, French coffee, Indisch food, indisch restaurant, Modern Life

This entry was posted on Friday, September 19th, 2008 at 23:07 and is filed under Chinese Food, Chongqing, Modern China. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.