End of Vacation

So I went to Chengdu, capital of Sichuan Province on Feb 22. It was a pretty nice place. Calm, quiet city. I spent a lot of time wandering the city center and the town square the first day, before my friends arrived later that night. The square is a cool place, it was still the national holiday week, so people were out and shopping and sitting in the square and stuff. There's a huge Mao statue overlooking the square, and behind the Mao is the science museum and a toy store where they sell all sorts of remote control cars and stuff. The next day we ate lunch at the Popeye Chicken behind the Mao. Popeye. Not Popeye's. It seemed like it was supposed to be the same, with fried chicken and stuff. The chicken wasn't bad, but the ketchup was weird, and the mashed potatoes weren't good. But whatever. We ended up playing in the square behind the Mao with lots of kids and their rubber band powered model airplanes. It was nice spending time among the locals. Didn't end up seeing a whole lot of sights in Chengdu, but there actually really isn't a whole lot to see. We did get to go to the Panda Reserve, the official research and breeding center for pandas in China/the world. That was really cool. We went in the morning, during feeding time. Which doesn't mean you see keepers bringing food out. It's just the best time of day to see the pandas active, moving and eating bamboo, because they sleep for most of the day I guess. Pandas are really funny. Clumsy and funny with those black eye patches of theirs. There were also red pandas, the ones that look like foxes. they're really cute too. And for 50 kuai, about $7, I got to sit down with a red panda in my lap and give him a couple of apple slices for maybe a minute or 2 before they took him away from me. that was really fun. I think you can do that with a regular Giant panda too, but you don't really get to touch it. And it costs like 800 kuai at least.

That was the main thing we did. Wandered some. Went to the Wenshu Buddhist Temple, the biggest one in somewhere. I don't remember. It was pretty nice. big gardens in the middle of the city, and they had a vegetarian restaurant that was pretty good too. Saw Sichuan Opera, which is a big variety show, kinda like the one I saw in Xi'an (Shaanxi province). Music, dancing, skits, but this one was cool because it had a puppet lady, breathing fire, and quick-changing masks. We also were introduced to Peter's Tex-Mex Restaurant, which got shortened to Big Pete's, or Texas Pete's, and we ended up going to this place like 3 or 4 times. Real tex-mex and western food, milkshakes, pies, potato salad, mmmmmmm. Now, I don't really ever get homesick for western food, but when you find a place that does it good, for relatively cheap, you must take advantage. Chengdu is pretty geared towards tourists, tons of coffee houses and western food.

Since it was the very end of the New Year holiday, travel was expensive and crowded. Especially trying to get back to Shenzhen or anywhere south, where many people moved to work. Plane tickets were crazy expensive, so we planned to take the train. Long ride (40 hours) but at least we would've gotten beds and space to walk around on the train. Except that train tickets were sold out. So we ended up taking the bus. Tickets were 630 kuai, more than a plane ticket would be during a normal week. The lady at the ticket window told us it would be 28 hours. We arrived on the day we were to leave to find to our dismay that it was not a sleeper bus, just a normal one with slightly reclining seats. And the long ride through the mountains and down to shenzhen ended up taking us 36 hours. so uncomfortable. But oh well. made it back. Started teaching again, and it's not great, but it isn't nearly as bad coming back as I imagined it would be while I was on vacation in Thailand. Which I will write about soon.