Thursday...

THURSDAY…

MeiMei continues to amaze us. She is very good natured, even tempered and quiet. Nothing really seems to faze her much. In China, children are viewed as community property. People feel very free to come up and touch the baby and offer suggestions on what we should be doing. None of this bothers her. She is a very easy baby to deal with and appears to be the Yang to her older sister's Yin. Yesterday we visited Chiqikou, a former village that has been swallowed by the vast sprawl of Chongqing. Chiqikou is now a tourist stop that depicts traditional village life. Narrow streets, lots and lots and lots of vendors, and a spectacular Buddhist temple overlooking the Jialing (the main tributary to the Yangtze).

We returned at 1 and once MeiMei went to sleep we had a masseuse come to the room--about 2 hours later, both of us were kink-free after a pretty intensive Chinese massage. Today we are off to the Chiang K'ai-shek museum here. I'll beinterested to see what the museum has to say about him. Chongqing continues to amaze us. Its listed population is about 7 million, but we've heard from our guide and the hotel manager that the estimate is an old one and that the urban population now may be closer to 20 million. It is a huge, bustling place. Ths skyscapers just go for miles and miles. Well, I need to freshen up for the day's events. All is well here and we wish all of you the best.