Chengdu

So I know it’s been about three weeks since I was even in Chengdu but that’s okay….
We were in Chengdu for two nights and one full day. We got to our hotel at about midnight and hit the sack. The next morning we took a bus to the Panda Research Center. That was really cool. There were a bunch of enclosures with pandas of all ages. The older ones were pretty lazy. I guess all they do is eat bamboo and sleep all the time; probably because they don’t get enough calories from the bamboo to move. The younger pandas were much more active wrestling and playing with each other. They also Probably the best part of the research center were the baby pandas… they have a few baby pandas in various stages of development. The oldest one was a month old and had its spotted fur already, lying in the ‘panda position’. We just decided to call it that because it seems like all the pandas sleep all stretched out on their stomachs. Anyways, there were smaller pandas too that looked oddly like rats… pink and hairless with a fairly long tail that seemed to shrink as they grew up. They were about 4 or 5 inches long from their head to the end of their tails.

After the pandas we had a free afternoon so I went with some people to a Buddhist monastery in the middle of Chengdu its called Wenshu Yuan. The monastery was really incredible which multiple courtyards and temples. At one point an older Chinese man came up to me and my friend to tell us some history about how in WWII the stayed in Chengdu to attack the Japanese. I think that makes us best friends.

For dinner we went to a hotpot restaurant. Hotpot is kind of like Chinese fondue. There are two different broths in the center of a heated table and you get a bunch of raw meat and roots and such. You dump them in and wait a couple of minutes, then dip in your chopsticks, fish around a bit and come up with something. My chopsticks skills are still not up to par so it was a rough and messy meal – but fun just the same.