Chengdu, China 10-12-09

As soon as we got to Chengdu we hailed a taxi and checked into our hostel, Sim’s Cozy Garden Guesthouse. Sim’s was by far one of the nicest hostels I’ve ever stayed in! The place had a beautiful courtyard/garden and pond in the front. Our rooms had an Asian influence to them, a restaurant was built into the hostel (which had fantastic food), there was a pool table, ping pong table, and dart board in other areas, and the place even had a massive bar downstairs! If we didn’t come to Chengdu for the pandas and big Buddha, we wouldn’t have needed to leave our hostel for anything.

After our 16 hour train ride we were hungry and pretty tired (I only slept a few hours because of the snoring). We decided to go get massages but first stopped along the way for some food. We walked into a little place and were handed menus. Usually we can get by with ordering food by pointing at the pictures on the menu, or by pointing to food on other people’s plates, but this menu had no pictures and we were alone in the restaurant.

The restaurant owner only knew the word- Kung Pao Chicken in English (the most expensive thing on the menu we guessed). We kept saying “rice”, “noodles”... nothing worked. Luckily, I had my camera on me and since I usually take pictures of the good food we eat, I showed her pictures of rice, noodles, and soup. But, she just kept saying “no, no, no”. Supposedly they didn’t have any of that. So, we ordered the Kung Pao Chicken. Less than 5 minutes later we saw her carrying rice and something else in her hands so we ordered those too. We ended up with white rice, bamboo shoots, and the infamous Kung Pao Chicken, that had chili peppers in it that were so hot, we couldn’t even eat the dish. Rich and Richard each tried a pepper before we knew how hot they were and both of them needed about 10 cups of tea before they could talk again. Note: do not order the Kung Pao Chicken. Another thing that helped the meal taste a bit better was soy sauce. I learned how to say soy sauce (jiang yo) in Chinese back in Xian and it has been a life saver ever since!

After our bamboo shoots meal, we walked over to a Chinese massage shop we had heard about. I’ve had massages in the US before... you get your own room, the lights are dimmed, soft music is playing, and maybe a candle or fragrant scent is in the air… this place was the polar opposite of that. From the street we were able to look inside and see 8 people laying on tables with their clothes on, getting rubbed. We all looked at each other stunned… but proceeded inside anyway. We scoped out the massage scene for a little while, and the masseurs really looked like they knew what they were doing! So, we all signed up and waited our turns. After longer observation, we realized that all of the masseurs were blind. Apparently, it’s common to get a massage from the blind in China.

When it was my turn I watched my masseur walk towards the waiting area, I looked at him and pointed to myself with a quizzical look on my face and stood up. He didn’t do anything. So, I walked up to him and touched his hand and said Ni-hao (hello). He nodded and tapped the massage table gesturing that I should lie down. An hour later, I was massaged, stretched, twisted, shaken, cracked, and feeling pretty good actually. All of that for $3.50 US... not too bad!

On the walk back we stopped in a candy store and picked out all sorts of things that we had no idea what they would taste like. Some were really good and others were horrid, but it was still pretty fun to share and sample them all. We rented a movie at our hostel (they had over a thousand DVD’s for us to borrow and watch for free in our rooms), the guys picked up some take out noodle soup (which they had a fun time demonstrating and playing charades to get the soup shop owner to understand what they wanted), and we all ate our soup and watched the movie- Into The Wild in our room.

In the morning, we woke up early and took a 2 hour bus ride to Leshan and then rode around on a local bus to Dafo to get to the largest Buddha in the world (he was 233 feet tall). We took a lot of pictures (well, I did…because a really cool backpacker in Xian, Jono, gave me a photo stitching program and I wanted to practice using it). And a few hours later we headed back for another movie night.

The next day we went to the panda breeding base in Chengdu (the only breeding base in the world) and saw two-week-old baby pandas and full sized pandas, up-close and personal. It was fun to see them climb and lounge in the trees, eat bamboo, and gingerly walk around the play areas. They were pretty cute. We even saw some red pandas (never heard of those before), which were pretty cute too, but looked more like red raccoons than pandas.

For lunch we had noodle soup and dumplings (repetitive, but different and delicious every time), and then picked up some fruit for our train rides out of Chengdu. Our group of 4 was splitting up… Shelly and Rich were off to take a cruise on the Yangzi River and Richard and I were going to Yangshou to see the famous limestone mountain peaks on the Li River. We said our goodbyes at the train station and Richard and I got on our 26 hour long train ride.

Next stop… Yangshou! :)