Panda Expressed

Hao jou bu jian (long time no see.) It's been a while since I've posted anything and am overwhelmed by the task of trying to document our spectacular trip to Thailand, Cambodia, Malayasia, and Hong Kong. Not to mention our travels with Kassy's father in China to Chengdu and Xian. For the next week I'll try to do one blog post about each of the cities we visited in our 40-some day excursion.

-Chengdu-

Before going to Chengdu, I'll admit I was pretty nervous, if not down right terrified. This would be our first experience of traveling alone (without a friend that speaks chinese) in China. To say I have a cognitive mapping deficiency would be a drastic understatement. To paint a picture, I didn't know the route to my high school until I was a junior. If some one told me to go south, I would look for a man hole to go down. That being said, I was planning on navigating my way through a city of 12 million Chinese speakers, what could go wrong?

Luckily, Chengdu is one of the most international friendly cities in China and it isn't too difficult to figure out. The first day we arrived we decided to check out a Sichuan Opera which in my opinion was amazing. The performance consisted of a plethora of different talents such as shadow puppetry, dancing, Chinese acrobatics, music from the Chinese two stringed instrument "erhuo", and the famous face change. Some of these performances would have absolutely annihilated the competition in America's got talent. I strongly recommend everyone reading this to look up a face changing video online, had I known that it existed, I would have had a much different answer to the "What do you want to be when you grow up?" question.

The next day we had to get up early after a bit of a late night on bar street. That morning we went to a Panda bear habitat. Now I was a little mad when the World Wrestling Federation (WWF) had to change its acronym because of World Wildlife Foundation on the account of the endangered species. Now I will do anything to support the continued existence of Pandas. They are easily the most lovable creatures on the planet. I will post a couple of videos of them on facebook or you could watch the movie kung fu panda, they pretty much show the same thing.

One of my favorite spots in the limited time I was in Chengdu, was a place called the people's park. There's a tea drinking patio where all the chairs and tables are made of bamboo. Men with head lamps come around and ask to clean your ears holding fistfuls of utensils that look strikingly similar to those that you would see while seated in a dentist chair. Kassy and I declined, but took delight in watching the process being done to a patron next to us. Another real cool spot was the night market on Jinli street. The road is decorated with thousands of Chinese lanterns and looks like the town in the movie "Spirited Away."

An added bonus of going to Chengdu was we didn't have to have another welcome feast for Kassy's father. After four nights in a row of ceaseless gorging and gan bei-ing, a simple meal felt really luxurious, especially when it came with real coffee.