Thursday, 22nd July 2010

Today the blog has been written on the bus coming back from the new university campus, built 20 km far away from the center of ChongQing, in a site where some years ago there was just a green land with no villages.

In this picture you can see the entrance wall, 1929 meters long: ChongQing University has been founded in 1929!
In order to attract Universities to move there, the local authorities decided to found from scratch a new town.
The aim of university campus is to satisfy every need of the students.
The engineers even thought about a special place for couples who want to spend a romantic evening in a beautiful natural area.
We followed a romantic path in the green forest and finally we arrived at the top of the hill dominated by a quite big pagoda where we had a rest: we were really sweat and thirsty after a long walk under the sun to reach the top.


However this is not the only activity of the day: as usually we had lessons in the morning which dealt about rural and urban development and also Chinese attitude to risk in entrepreneurship, which could be resumed by a Chinese proverb (the so called “chengyu”) “holding the rock to cross the river”.
So we learned a little bit more about Chongqing entrepreneurship reality.
LUNCH TIME: the choice was “sushi or massage?? That’s the question”. We decided for sushi while three brave guys experimented Chinese typical massage (anmo).
They found it extremely relaxing and so they convinced everyone to try next week…. In fact tomorrow we are leaving for Chengdu: Pandas are waiting for us!!!
After the lunch break we visited one of the hotels of the King’s world HK hotel chain, owned by the Chinese government: it’s a high level hotel whose guests are Chinese businessman. We were really surprised by the presidential suit which have three bathroom with Jacuzzi, two beautiful bedrooms and other relaxing areas: we hope to be hosted in that room as soon as possible, but we doubt to be able to pay the bill: the cost of one night was about 3.000 € !!!!!
We have been able to visit the VIP meeting room, where the president of ChongQing Municipality uses to meet his important guests.


We also had the opportunity to assist of a training course for the hotel staff, and we admired the expert waiters showing how to prepare and serve the Chinese tea.
Now we have to go because we are hungry and we must not be late: tonight it’s the first time we go out all together to a disco bar; we all are very curious about this Chinese way of enjoying the nights and we don’t want our classmates to wait for us!


Eleonora and Chiara

PS: someone of us received calls from Milan asking information about flood in ChongQing; we want everybody to know that the situation in here is very quiet and safe; no problems at all!