h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

My daughter El is spending a year teaching English in China.

She went out in August after completing her Master's degree (literally - she handed in her thesis at noon and flew to China at 6pm.) She'll return to Ireland at the end of July 2016.

So Mrs G and I are going to China for 2 weeks to see here. We'll be staying for 9 nights in the city where she is working and will spend a couple of days in Hong Kong at the end of the trip. We're not going to see all the sights that people usually see when they go to China, such as Beijing, the Great Wall or Shanghai.

Chongqing (pronounced Chong-ching) is China's biggest inland city, as far as I can tell, with about 6 million people, but it has grown to that size very recently. It's on the Yangtse Kiang river, at a junction between it and another big river, the Jialing. Chongqing is about 900km from the sea, but it is 2,000km if you go down the river, as the river doesn't go by the most direct route. About 500km downstream from Chongqing lie the Three Gorges - over a million people were displaced when the Chinese government built the Three Gorges Dam, the largest Hydroelectric scheme in the world. These people were all moved to Chongqing, swelling the population of the city.

We'll be staying in a suburb town called Shapingba. El's place of work is about 30 minutes from there, but there are no hotels in her area that will accept foreigners.

I got the last of my injections yesterday. The hotels and flights are all booked, and we handed in our visa applications to the Chinese embassy yesterday (running the gauntlet of protesters outside the embassy - there are plenty of things in China to protest about).

I'm beginning to look forward to it.

Have a super holiday. Chongching has relatively little history, although there was some interesting WWII stuff, but the food is pretty good.
I've just booked a holiday in Hong Kong between 5th and 22nd January.
Greatly looking forward to it. Who are you flying with? I'm doing Dublin to Amsterdam with Aer Lingus, then on with KLM.

I loved Hong Kong when I was there, and my najapomo alter ego will be going there in a couple of days.

Is Chongqing the origin of the transliterated Chun King, which was used for a line of food items?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chun_King

We're flying British Airways Dublin to London to Hong Kong and China Airlines Hong Kong to Chongqing.

Chongqing used to be spelled Chungking.

IIRC, the first I heard of the Three Gorges Dam project was in relation to how it would doom the Baiji or Yangtse River Dolphin, one of the creatures Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine traveled to see while writing _Last Chance to See_. I'm not sure the project was announced before the book was released or not. I skimmed through that chapter just now, but didn't spot it, but I easily could have missed it.

I think that dolphin is now extinct.

Oh, absolutely.

The Kakapo of New Zealand is still around though.

http://youtu.be/9T1vfsHYiKY

Collected the visas today. So we're all clear for our trip next Monday. All I need to do now is some packing. On past form, I'll probably end up doing this on Monday morning.

Wow. Has El learnt to speak Chinese in advance? How does she find the language?

She picked up quite a lot of Mandarin Chinese through on-line courses.

Mandarin appears to be the official language throughout China. There's also a local language, which I don't know the name of.

When we were in San Francisco, our guide on the bus tour was obviously particularly interested in languages (he was a Spanish speaker himself, which helps) He had lived for a while in Chinatown among Cantonese speaking people. The language was very unpleasant to his ears. The Mandarin speakers lived in another part of SF and he found that language much more pleasant to listen to. (I think I've got that the right way round - WS would know) The odd thing is that they all look the same written down!

Anyway - bon voyage!

I believe that Cantonese is quite a common language among Chinese people living outside of China, but rather rare in China itself, being the local language of just one small part of the country. There are many other local languages but for some reason none of the people speaking them ever left China.

And is it true (I heard it on the radio) that Beijing is pronounced "Pee-king" by the people who live there?

I hadn't heard that. But from what I can make out the letter b represents an aspirated p like the way an Irish person says a p. I thought it should be 'Pay-ching'.

Pay-ching is probably the Dubliner pronunciation...

I've finally started to learn some Chinese.

Ni hau! Ni shenti hau ma?
I prefer the sound of Cantonese (spoken in Hong Kong, which partly explains its influence)When in Shanghai I learnt to count in Shanghainese. I taught the market women to count in English in return. twenty years later I had forgotten the Chinese words (although I can remember the hand gestures, because they are universal in China)but the market ladies could still remember the English words.

We're now installed in our hotel in Shapingba, a suburb of Chongqing. We've got wifi in the hotel and I can post to h2g2. Facebook and Google are banned but Bing is available, presumably with search results restricted to approved sites. The bing maps are much more accurate than the Googlemap but all the labels are in Chinese characters.

One of the suitcases attracted attention from the customs officials - the one with magazines and newspapers. We were wondering would the free copy of the Daily Mail we picked up in London be allowed through but there was no problem.

That sounds like the old days when people had to hide Mickey Mouse comics for the kids behind the lining of the car doors and under the flooring.