Today our favorite, and only, TA Chen joined us. He didn’t know it at the time, but he would soon be plagued with problems. When we got to Chongqing we were trying to turn around so we could get all of our luggage off the bus and while we were doing that, our bus hit a car. There really don’t seem to be any rules when it comes to driving in China, and because of that, I have absolutely no idea whose fault it was.

Our bus driver hit the front bumper of a car! And we still don’t know whose fault it was!

Once we got to the hotel we got some lunch and headed over to the Three Gorges Museum. We explored the museum for a few hours and watched a 360 degree movie. It was mostly in Chinese, so a lot of it was hard to understand, but it was cool to be able to look all around you, even behind, and see the movie. I wondered how they made the movie and fit each of the screens together so perfectly. It was like an IMAX movie but the film extended the whole way around the theater.

After visiting the museum we went to the zoo for an hour. We got to see pandas, tigers, yaks, hippos, rhinos, camels and a lot more animals. The zoo in China is a lot more lenient than the zoo in America. There were people throwing Cheeto type food directly into the animal cages and there were no guards yelling at them or anything. I feel like you could walk right into the cage and not get caught for a minute or two. After visiting the zoo, we were on the way back to our hotel when our bus broke down. Xinli had a friend to meet, so he had to take a taxi back to the hotel, leaving Chen alone with almost 40 students.

Everyone was patiently and happily waiting for the bus to be fixed.

We waited an hour for a repairman to come fix the bus, but a lot of us were trying to get a taxi instead. Once the bus was fixed we drove all of two minutes back to the hotel. That night, a lot of us went to Pizza Hut for dinner. Chen didn’t want us to go alone so he led the way through the sketchiest ally I have been in while in China. In some parts of the ally it was so dark you could barely see. But Chen prevailed and we made it to Pizza Hut.

My Chinese teacher told me that Pizza Hut in China was a lot different than Pizza Hut in America, so I wanted to check it out for myself. The biggest differences were the elegance and the portion size. The medium pizzas were a lot smaller than they would be in America. A medium was basically equivalent to a small. And they also charge you extra money to get cheese on the pizza. I guess they usually don’t get cheese on their pizzas?

I couldn’t tell you what happened the rest of the night because I was so sick that I went straight to bed after dinner, but we definitely had an interesting first day in Chongqing.