CHONGQING — We have an eight-day holiday now, so I decided to get one last trip in before I buckle down to teach my 280 students for the next four months. So here I am in busy Chongqing.
I have a friend here, and originally I was going to come for a visit in July for the solar eclipse. But, I was invited at the last minute to visit someone else in Liuyang (in Hunan) the weekend following the eclipse, making visiting Chongqing a little impractical. So I postponed the trip indefinitely.
My options this holiday week were to stay in Jishou and hang out with the many folks who did not go home, or splurge and take this trip. I did both, as it turns out.
Since Moon (my friend here) had to work overtime Oct. 1-3, I stayed in Jishou and observed China’s 60th National Day and the traditional Mid-Autumn Moon Day with my Jishou friends. Nearly everyone on campus was glued to the new flat-screen TVs installed in the campus dining hall to watch the National Day festivities in Beijing Oct. 1. I watched it on and off in my apartment.
The ceremonies included displays of China’s military personnel and hardware, and a sort of creepy review of the troops by President Hu Jintao.
With his Mao-jacket-bedecked torso sticking out of the sunroof of an enormous, black Chinese-made limo (similar to the one Mao once had), Hu repeated the same phrases over and over again as he greeted the troops. I swear he never moved a muscle other than the ones operating his mouth.
