China: Chengdu

Chengdu 09.05-12.05

After spending just over a week in Malaysia, we were very excited to be catching our flight to Chengdu in China. On the plane we met a friendly Chinese woman who was studying some ridiculously complicated science PHD in Singapore and we told her all the places we were to visit in China. It became clear that our Chinese pronunciation was not really up to scratch. We kept saying we were going to ‘Chengdu’, ‘Xi’an’ and ‘Beijing’ among other places. We repeated them about 10 times before she finally understood and said ‘Ohhhh Chengdu, Xi’an and Beijing!’ in completely different tones and pronunciations. To establish the fact that we were going to the ‘Jiuzhaigou’ National Park took about 25 attempts! We found it quite funny that it seemed so difficult to make her understand that we were going to Chengdu, when we were on a flight to Chengdu! In Chinese it is said more like ‘Chongdu’, but still that’s not that big a difference. We actually had this discussion with a nice couple we met on a bus who had had this problem all over China!

We managed to make it to China, and after all the hassle of getting the Visa in Kuala Lumpur we were simply waved through immigration in a couple of minutes. We even had the opportunity to electronically rate the level of service provided while we were waiting. Nina was ‘satisfied’ with the process. We managed to find the airport bus without much hassle and got to the hostel just after midnight where Nina wished me a happy birthday.

The next day on my actual birthday we decided to go and see the Pandas in the morning and go to a Sichuan Opera in the evening. Nina gave me my birthday present in the morning, a swatch watch we bought in Kuala Lumpur and a card she made while I was snoozing on the plane (we don’t get much time apart!). We then went to the Giant Panda Research Base located just on the outskirts of Chengdu. It was quite ironic that this event, the one Nina has been looking forward to most out of our whole trip, happened to fall on my birthday! Saying that, I enjoyed it just as much as her as the Pandas were ridiculously cute. There are about 70 in the entire enclosure and we were allowed to see about 40 of them. We saw Pandas of all ages but our favourite were the young ones who were only about 3 or 4 feet tall and seemed to spend most of their day just snoozing in the trees. The reason for going early in the morning was to see them all at feeding time. They grouped about 8 of them together and provided what seemed to be an unlimited amount of bamboo! The whole facility was extremely well looked after and the Pandas all seemed to be really happy which made the experience even better.

After a nice Sichuan lunch, a few of games of Table Tennis in our hostel and a couple of beers with some other travellers, we made our way to see the Sichuan Opera. It was a mish-mash of different acts, from comedy to dancing and acrobatics, and it culminated in the famous ‘face-changing’ show. The face-changers wore masks that they could seamlessly change instantly to different colours and designs. We were bamboozled and really enjoyed it. After the show we wandered up to the central Tianfu Square to see the imposing statue of Chariman Mao that looked down the main boulevard. It was an amazing birthday and one that I definitely won’t forget!

The following day we endeavored to do some serious sightseeing around the city. We visited the Wenshu monastery which was set in a beautiful courtyard with ponds that had hundreds of terrapins and frogs in them. The streets surrounding the monastery looked extremely oriental so we had a walk around there and looked in some of the shops. There was a fairground game where you threw beanbags at toys to hit them off the shelf and win them. I stepped up to win Nina a panda- but alas we left with no panda in hand. We then went to a famous shopping street named ‘big and small alley’- a slightly strange name but an awesome place with loads of interesting shops and street food stalls. There was a shop named ‘Panda House’ which sold literally EVERYTHING panda. Nina was in heaven and ended up getting a long-desired Panda t-shirt. We also tried some of the street food, Nina went for mystery meat with chilli in a banana leaf while I opted for a single rib. Both were distinctly average. We then tracked down an antique market that sold loads of fascinating Mao-era trinkets. There were communist propaganda cartoons and the ‘little red books’. We ended up buying three Mao badges which were worn during the Cultural Revolution as a sign of devotion to Mao. For dinner, we decided to try the Sichuan delicacy hot-pot which was absolutely….horrible! It all looked very promising as it was a similar setup to the Satay restaurants in Malaysia where you choose your own skewers and cook them in a broth in front of you. We chose the ‘half spicy’ broth which turned out to be a big pot literally split in two between a spicy broth on one side and some water with tomatoes and a random fish floating in it on the other side. Another problem was the fact we had no clue what any of the meat was. As it was all marinated, what looked like beef when raw came out when cooked to look and taste like no meat we’d ever had before! The only meat we could definitely tell what it was were the chicken feet which we wanted to by-pass anyway! To make matters worse we accidentally poured vinegar onto our rice thinking it was soy. A wholly unsatisfying dinner!

Wenshu Temple

Wenshu Temple

Mystery meat!

Our rather odd hot-pot

Unidentified meat

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