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[Mister Barfly]

I am going to Chongqing during Chinese new year.  Has anybody been there or is living there?  Any advise on what to see and do would be great.

[mlaeux]

Here is the Chongqing expat forum. There is a lot of useful information there. I think you'll like it.
http://www.cqexpat.com/ 

[Eagle]

There's a great street where all kinds of traditional medicine is done on the street - flaming cups and the works.  I forget where in the city it actually is.  Truth is, I liked the city, especially the HOT soup which is liquid fire.

[chinalin]

Hey Mister Barfly

Leaving this morning, later, to go to GZ, meet my friend from Oz when she arrives, and then fly to Chongqing this afternoon.  We will  be there for four days, before heading off down the Yangtze on the Victoria Queen to Yichang.  We will be back in Zhaoqing, next Sunday night late.  So, if you PM me some time later, I will (hopefully) be able to tell you what we found, what was good, etc.

Lin
Zhaoqing, Guangdong.

 

[monkeymind]

I used to live (in a smaller city) in Chongqing. The wikitravel site on Chongqing seems to have been massivle updated, and has more info than I could give you.http://wikitravel.org/en/Chongqing

Anyways, the most popular thing is to take a trip to the Dazu rock carvings. Haven't done that myself, but I plan on doing it this year. Ciqikou ancient village has a lot of the same old tourist shops as any similar place, but it is pretty genuinely old (not a whole lot of fake re-done stuff), and if you take a peak behind the main tourist walk, you'll see that it really is a weird ancient village with people living there and all. HuaYan Temple is a nice temple with a massive Gold Buddha, which has an enormous, and quite nice, green park space around it. Lohan temple is kind of run down, and less beautiful, but it's really pretty neat how it's right in the middle of enormous Jiefangbei skyscrapers. It's also famous from the movie "Crazy Stone". Yangren Jie (Foreigner street) is kind of a silly, fun place. You can also get there by taking the cable car across the Chang Jiang river and then a bus, and the cable car is pretty fun in itself. Chaotianmen is where the Jialing and Yangtze rivers meet. Most pictures of Chongqing are just pictures of Chaotianmen, and people from Chongqing will also say you have to go there, but really there's nothing there but people hawking you maps and boat rides.

I recommend staying in Jiefangbei (which you probably are) as you can get up to a lot of adventure just by walking around there. Chongqing has multiple "city centres", but Jiefangbei and Shapingba (near Ciqikou) are probably the only one's you want to go to.

By far the best thing to do in Chongqing is eat and drink. I still think that Chongqing style Sichuan food is the very best food Chinese food.

[decurso]

 I really disliked Chongqing. The air is black and the city layout is a maze located on a mountain, so you are constantly either walking uphill or downhill. It's pretty easy to find yourself walking for half an hour only to wind up in the same place where your started.

 However, I did have a good time there. Even in the dead of winter, it's still warm enough to eat outdoors. There is a street nicknamed "hotpot street" near the Victory Monument that is worth checking out. Take a dinner cruise along the Yangtze River. Visit Ciqikou, a Ming Dynasty era viallage on a cliff overlooking the Jialing river. Check out Red Cliff Village, an ubber-nationalistic museum on the site of the CCP-Chang Kai-Shek summit. Take a cable car ride over one (or both) of the rivers.

 As far as I could tell, the nightlife sucks, so if you plan on spending nights out, you are better off making friends with the locals at one of the many night markets. Chongqing ren will be glad to have you join them and will happily tell you how Chongqing is the most beautiful city in China.