The brighter side of Chongqing

We spent yesterday finding and dining with the couple who sponsored Jack through 3 years of school. And what’s more I finally saw a nice side to this dirty city. In the morning, a very unusually cool but gray one, we loaded into a taxi to look for the sponsor, only knowing where he had worked several years ago, for the highway department. It took some time and lots of asking to find the right place only to find out it had moved. Fortunately the couple running a watermelon stand at the old location knew where it had moved to, so we loaded back up and managed to find it, again with much stopping to ask. A man outside the building happened to be walking by who knew the name and which floor he worked on and the guard inside then looked it up and called him. He was needless to say quite surprised and didn’t quite know what to do with me at first. We went up and they chatted for a while. Jack called his wife, who he says was the real sponsor, and she invited us to dinner. Jack’s aunts weren’t too thrilled - they like to keep everyone captive at home and don’t understand why anyone would go out with anyone who wasn’t family.

But we went in the evening to their very nice apartment in a complex by the Yangtze with the best playground for the kids we’ve run across so far. It was broken and run down in parts like they all are but the boys still had a blast. They took us to a restaurant directly overlooking the Yangtze in an area that has been very well developed and reminded me a bit of Shanghai, or the Houhai bar area in Beijing. We tried to get a table on the roof with a gorgeous view but they were worried about rain and sent us back to the boring first floor. Still it was a nice dinner, Jack snuck away to pay before they could much to their consternation. Still, I think they were touched by the whole thing – that he would go to the effort to find them and take them to dinner. Apparently a lot of sponsorees don’t even bother to write their annual letter of their progress. Jack had been kind of embarrassed though that he didn’t really work as hard as he should have in high school and didn’t make it to a top university – they had offered to pay his university tuition if he did. They were a lovely couple, much less bossy and invasive than most people. We went to walk along the river after dinner, where a friend or relative of theirs who had joined us bought the boys these kind of light sabers that thrilled them to no end. It was very nice to experience a clean and pretty side to the city (I even saw foreigners for the first time here and they looked equally surprised to see me) – on the ride over I had been telling Jack that I really could not stand this city (despite his grandma trying hard to persuade us to live here by telling us what a paradise it is), so I was glad to be proven wrong.

Still, I'm glad we are leaving for Fuzhou tomorrow. That might prove to be just as crazy but it'll be a change, and beach too!