Zunyi? I thought you said Chongqing.

Well, it's definitely becoming an interesting week... and I only got here yesterday.

I was originally under the impression that I was going to Chongqing, a city near Sichuan Province in southern China. I thought that because Dary told me that's where we were going. Even when we were at the train station and he handed me my ticket, he said "we're going to Chongqing" I looked at the ticket; it said "To Zunyi." I thought, that's odd, and said that I thought we were going to Chongqing. We are, first to my hometown! And... that's odd, I thought Chongqing was your hometown.

Turns out he grew up here, then his parents moved to Chongqing... I think he just tells people his hometown is Chongqing... It probably sounds better. It is a bigger more developed city than this one. There's not much here.

So... instead of a 16 to 20 hour very fast train to Chongqing, we rode the "fast train" (the train that stops at all stations) to a place a few hours from Chongqing, Zunyi. It was a 38 hour train ride. Not the longest I have been on, to Lhasa was 48 hours, but I had a bed then. This trip was all on hard seats, a lot of people. We left on Thursday night at 10:16 exactly and arrived in Zunyi 12:15 pm on Saturday. Our cluster of seats didn't clear up until about 3 am on Saturday, so from that point on we got to lie down. Which was really nice. I got some restful sleep.

And now we're here in Zunyi. Not much to see. I got to see the site of the Zunyi Conference; where the Communist party met after Mao's long march concluded and they discussed battle plans for attacking the Nationalists in neighboring Chongqing.

We'll see if I can get to Chongqing or some place interesting. I think Dary just wants to be here for the girlfriend... understandable; except their fighting is pretty bad. There was just a pretty bad one... We'll see how the rest of this week goes... It's all kind of exciting!