27 March 2013
I made my own dinner
My hotel room has a full kitchen. I celebrated by making my own dinner, more on that later.
If they were to remake bladerunner, it could be filmed in Chongqing.
The skyscrapers are endless, but very interesting. The layout of the city encircled by rivers with cliffs descending into them makes for some terrifying construction.
The city itself is also quite hilly and interesting, streets loop back around onto themselves.
The centre of the city is largely 'finished' with the focus now being on river crossings and the waters edge. Appparently there are actually 4 centres to the city, where I am is just one of them.
Story time, I went shopping in Ole, which is famous for having all imported products and being expensive. Its still cheaper than Australia though.
Theres 2 big food scandals in China, milk and or milk powder which killed off a few babies, and gutter oil. Ole is full of ultra ultra expensive versions of both.
They have the same long life devondale milk I use at home, for $8 Australian a litre. Theres an entire section dedicated to imported baby milk powder, but I have no clue how much that usually costs (praise the lord/allah/vishnu/buddha). They also have plain old crisco canola oil, for about $10 a litre.
Everything else in the store is cheap, but they are relying on the fears of foreigners and perhaps wealthy Chinese to engage in profiteering.
I was out around dusk, the best time for photos. The city is mostly cool shadows. If you dont like skyscrapers, bad luck.
These 2 are either side of the pedestrian street.
And looking back from the descent into the river area.
This isnt finished yet and I couldnt find a spot to get a clear shot of it. Its a homage to the Shanghai expo China pavillion, only much bigger.
This blew my mind. The scale of this is not really understood in the photo. Its a double decker bridge for a start. Its probably a hundred metres off the water. And on that, wheres the water? Somehow they have diverted it whilst they make the bridge.
I have seen photos, theres normally A LOT of water in this river, as the height of the banks suggests.
Looking up river, you can see another bridge, and a sea of skyscrapers, and a lot of sand where a river should be.
The cliff top restaurants are rather funky. Lots of statues etc. such as this pirate ship.
Russian tourists have been catered for with plenty of high end shopping. I still dont know who actually buys stuff from here, these shops are always ghost towns.
And heres what I bought to prepare my dinner, pork belly, various vegetables, with shredded garlic and ginger and some chilli. I also bought noodles to prepare to have with it, but it made too much food so I skipped the noodles.
Ready.
Served.