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| PANDA |
To get to Chengdu, my classmates and I took the high-speed (gao tie) train from Hangzhou to Shanghai, took a bus from the train station to our airport, and from Shanghai’s Pudong airport flew to Chengdu on Sichuan Airlines. Flying on Sichuan Air was quite an experience, made even more exciting by the friendly service of identically clad flight attendants and cute little in-flight snack boxes filled with one of Chengdu’s specialty dishes: yu xiang rou si, a type of shredded pork with garlic sauce. It was a great start to an even greater experience.
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| Nifty Sichuanese air plane cuisine, complete with glob of spicy sauce in the middle. Yum! |
When we arrived in Chengdu, a family friend of Lesley picked us up at the airport and escorted us to the apartment complex where we were to stay the night. The next day, we drove outside of the city to one of Chengdu’s giant panda research centers. I was so excited to see the adorable black-and-white creatures wandering around their spacious mountainside habitats. Overall, the pandas had a pretty comfortable existence, especially when compared to my mental image of concrete boxes and iron bars. There were hills, bamboo forest, and toys for the pandas to climb on, and many of the pandas were munching on specially made “panda cookies”.
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| BABY PANDAS!!! |
The park was filled with busloads of Chinese tourists there to see the pandas, and their behavior was somewhat disappointing; there was lots of yelling, shouting, and tossing things at the poor pandas. It’s true that the Chinese and American ways of conducting tourism are quite different, and Chengdu’s tourist sites gave me a much deeper understanding of what it means to go on a vacation in China.
However, the best was yet to come. On Easter Sunday, the three of us traveled by cab to the northern part of downtown Chengdu, where we found the Chengdu Research Center for Giant Panda Breeding. Again, we discovered loads of giant pandas roaming around their green enclosures and climbing into the forks of trees for a quick nap. There were also red, or lesser, pandas, which look remarkably like the American raccoon (an annoying but cute creature famous for getting into people's trashcans). Lots of Chinese and foreign tourists cooed over the adorable baby pandas playing and strained every which way to snag that perfect photograph. Elbows flew, feet were stomped on, but it was all worth it just to catch a glimpse of the pandas!
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| Hipster red panda won't even look at the camera |
The highlight of my Chengdu panda experience cost me 1300 RMB- the equivalent of about 200 American dollars. Such a donation to panda research bought me a nametag, t-shirt, panda related DVD, and the opportunity to take pictures with a baby panda on my lap! I donned a fashionable blue cape, booties and gloves and hugged the black-and-white squirming bundle of joy on my knees for the amount of time it takes to take 5 or 6 photos. It was the best moment of my life. I love Chengdu, and I love China for having pandas.
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| GAHHH ME WITH A PANDA BABY MY LIFE IS COMPLETE!!!!! |
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