Day 4 – Travel to Chengdu
This morning we checked out of our hotel and headed to the Beijing Airport. We flew on China South Airlines from Beijing to Chengdu which is the capitol of the Sichuan province. I watched ‘The Wife’ and ‘Journey’s End’ on the flight. Our flight was delayed one hour, sitting on the tarmac. About 30 minutes before landing there was a strong smell of burning plastic or burning electrical throughout the plane which was…concerning. But we landed ok so I guess it was not a fatal event. However I did have a brief paranoid fantasy of the cabin filling with burnt-plastic smoke…
Chengdu sits in a valley surrounded by mountains. 85% of China’s pandas live in the mountains and bamboo forests of the Sichuan province.
We visited a teahouse in a city park with a Bamboo Forest. While having traditional tea, our group was visited by people giving shoulder rubs and cleaning out the inside of people’s ears. It was raining so the park was mostly empty, but I watched 2 older women playing badminton, and also heard a couple strolling through the park playing something like a harmonica and singing Chinese opera songs.
We checked into our hotel – the Tianfu Sunshine Hotel – and then went out for a traditional Hotpot dinner at a specialty restaurant. We sat at a special round table with an electric burner under glass at each of our seats, then were given a metal bowl full of broth which came to a boil. The large lazy susan in the middle of the table was filled with plates of food that were to be cooked in the hotpots. It was all you could eat and drink, including TsingTao beer. Some of us tried the spicy Sichuan versions of the hotpots.
From Wikipedia:
Chengdu is known as “China’s party city” for its carefree lifestyle. Chengdu has more tea houses and bars than Shanghai despite having less than half the population. It is famous for its spicy food and red peppers, its Ma Po Tofu and Hot Pot restaurants. Chengdu is an officially recognised UNESCO City of Gastronomy. Tea houses are ubiquitous in the city and range from ornate traditional establishments with bamboo furniture to simple modern tea houses. Teas on offer include jasmine, longjing and biluochun tea. Tea houses are popular venues for playing mahjong.
In constrast to Japan, there are very few Western ‘sit down’ toilets in China… still. At the airport and other public places, only 2 out of 10 bathrooms have toilets. Everything else is the ‘squatty potty’ which is a tiled hole in the floor. At the restaurant tonight they only had the latter type of toilet, but Sophie was escorted to the 2nd floor to a Western toilet among some offices. When I tried to find the Western toilet up there, I was chased away by a lady! I feel like I am developing preemptive pee angst – always looking for the opportunity to use an available western style toilet – anticipating that it won’t be available when it is needed.
I did finally master the art of squatting to pee in Tanzania a year ago, because when you are out in the middle of nowhere on the Serengeti, you really don’t have a choice. But there I could hang onto the bumper of the truck so I could get back up when finished. Here – no such thing – it is institutionalized squatting. There is supposedly a toilet revolution happening under the direction the president, to bring more toilets to the country, but I don’t see it happening in the places we’ve visited.
Sophie says it is a great feeling to be here in China where she ‘looks like everyone else’ instead of being the minority. She has really bonded with the other girls in our “Green Group” and they are all sitting together in the back of the bus when we are driving around touring.
Tomorrow we go to see the Panda Park! …I am charging up my extra camera batteries.
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