This is a photo I saw on yahoo.com news yesterday. The article was about how the Yangtze River had turned red over the last few days, for an unknown reason.
My husband and I lived in Chongqing for a few months last fall. I actually you can see our apartment in this photo, across the river just to the right of the talltest building. We had the most amazing view from that apartment. We were on the 30th floor and at night all you could see were the beautiful city light, lights around the river and the many, many night curise boats.
We were living there during the fall, but people told us a lot of stories about this river during the spring. They told us becuase of the high amounts of rain the river actually floods and floods a lot. So much that the roads and highways at times are unuseable because there is so much water and the roads basically become a river too!
Chongqing was an amazing city to live in. It is surrounded by mountains, it gets some unreal thunder storms and we had a perfect view for that. The they city gets so hot and humid during the summer, about 40 plus 75%+ humidity on a normal day. The city known as one of the 'furnace' cities in China because of its extream heat.
I asked the translator at my husbands work where the jewelry markets were. She told me there was one and it was amazing. I was so excited. It was about a 20 minute walk from our place. It was the only market around, everything else was boutique shops and store and that is very strange for a city in China.
But, when I got to the market, I was so disapointed. It wasn't a 'jewely' maket at all. It was an everything market- christmas trees, Chinese new year decorations, slippers, winter hats, cheap polyester sweaters, cups and dishes, bedding and a few so called jewelry stores. Nearly all the the jewerly stores were the same, fake silver necklaces with giant pendants covered in sparkely rinestones. Not what I was looking for at all. I did manage to find one shop that was selling mala necklaces and bracelets and there were willing to sell me some beads. The only problem was they wanted about 10 times the price for each strand. I tried to barted them down to a normal price, but they didn't budge!
Seeing this photo yesterday brought back so many memories of last fall. Chongqing is an amazing city, just not too helpful for me getting jewelry supplies!
