Nice Hotel

St Joseph's Church

by mke1963

Hidden away, and closely hemmed in by a canyon of tower blocks, is the delightful ivy-covered old St Joseph's church. It is entirely invisible from busy Minsheng Lu. It is reached down a flight of steep, worn stone steps. At the bottom, a worn wooden gate opens onto a small courtyard. To the left, office and accommodation locks form a cloister, while the church stands on its own, apart from the rush of noise on the street above. The rich green ivy has clambered over every surface, seemingly hiding the church from aetheistic view.
Inside, the walls are bare and clean. A steady succession of worhshippers come in to pray and to leave gifts. When I was there, a young lady was loudly planning her wedding, and clearly causing some consternation to the staff. I guess she was demanding all kinds of things that one would not normally expect in a church. Hope it all went well.

ChongQing, China

by BobandHua

"Why we went"

My Son and I went to ChongQing to get a look at the place that my wife has to visit most often in the course of her work ( nearly 2 weeks a month she spends there).
I'd wanted to go to CQ for years as this is the place famous for building the 3 Gorges Dam. I wanted to go before they built it but never got the chance. Even now that they completed it a week before we arrived we still didn't actually visit the gorges as there were too many other beautiful places to visit there in the same area.
Sooo nice! In the middle of Szechuan province.

"Whats there"

CQ is a big city. Paced to out grow Shang Hai. We went there to look at investment property & have a little vacation at the same time.
The places like the Geological parks and the rafting trip and all are in the WuLong area about 2.5 hours East of CQ by car. We alos went to visit a beautiful mountain and grasslands area called XianNuShan.

A friend had built a home on another mountainside in WanSheng also beautiful!

After visiting these places I had no desire to return to overcrowded Macao.

"Adventure"

We did the following:
Rafting (low season unfortunately) in WuLong on the Wu Jiang River.
Touring the grasslands at XianNuShan as well as Horse back riding & Go Carting.
We went touring the Caves/Caverns at a nearby site. My son and I flew by this cable tram thing accross the gorge and back 800 meters high! It is just a little strap-on harness that is attached to metal wheels on an overhead cable that runs clear accross to the other side of the gorge and back, Very High!
At the Horseback riding center they gave me a horse with an attitude. I've ridden a lot and owned my own horse back in the states but the thing is... they train these horses differently. Some of the signals we give to make them slow down are they ones the chinese give to make'm go faster. So, everytime I tried to get him to slow down he would just go faster! By the end of the ride he was running as fast as he could and I couldn't make him stop. I was mentally counting the number of bones I thought I would break when I finally couldn't hold on any longer! Luckily, the trainer was able to get the horse to slow before we ran the guy over!

We also visited many geological parks, Gorges. Absolutely stunning but more stairs than I ever want to see again.