Sunday, Sept 20th, Yichang

Writing this, I realize tonight is the U2 concert in Boston that I was supposed to go to. Guess I can’t complain to be over here instead. But I hope all the Killington folks have a blast tonight.

We’ve had a great week since I last wrote. The highlight for me was definitely the pandas! We visited the Panda research and breeding center in Chengdu last Thursday and it was truly amazing. Of course, since there are only about 1000 pandas in the whole world, even getting to see one is special. But there are 60 of them at the center and we got to watch them playing, chomping on bamboo and generally living their relaxing panda life. But the best part was getting to hold one! It was definitely expensive, but makes a nice donation and when will I ever have such an opportunity again! So I had a one year old female on my lap (at one year old, she already weighed about 40 pounds!) She was very content to just enjoy being cuddled and eating her reward apples. She was very sweet and it was really wonderful.

Also in Chengdu, we visited the giant buddha. At 71 meters high, it’s the largest Buddha in the world and clearly very popular among the Chinese tourists.

We’ve also been able to experience several dinners of the traditional Sichuan spicy hot pot. It’s like an enormous fondu pot, but half has a serious kick to it as it’s swimming with chilis and hot peppercorns. So your mouth can be on fire for some of the time but it’s SO worth it. Yummmmm.

We next had three nights aboard a boat floating down the Yangtze river to view the three gorges. First our taxi driver let us off at the wrong spot, so after waiting about 30 minutes, we took our tour leader Milly’s advice and asked someone to borrow their cell phone. I guess it’s not a problem to borrow a stranger’s phone in China! The man was very helpful and even guided Milly to find us.

The boat was quite nice and aside from half the group humming the theme song to Titanic all the time, we all had a blast. We had Milly teach us traditional Chinese Mahjong, which is quite different from the computer version. Continuing my competitive streak, I was happy to win the first game! Walking through a park in Chengdu, we’d seen dozens of people playing Mahjong outside so now we’re ready to join in. I actually did join in a woman’s Tibetan dance in the park for a few minutes. They were very forgiving of my bumbling…

The most hilarious part of the boat ride was having our group take over the bar area. After the second night there was a show and then they played music for people to dance. The boat may have been an older crowd, but this music would put anyone to sleep! So we began a quest to find alternative music, but the selection on the boat was bleak. Finally someone came up with the innovative idea to put a loadspeaker next to an ipod and viola! Modern music to rock out to! A bunch of our crew ended up closing out the bar both nights dancing up a storm as our Chinese bartenders looked on with amusement. Of course, closing out the bar in China was 11:30, not exactly B Haus hours!

The boat was very relaxing and the gorges quite impressive. We didn’t enjoy one of the excursions to the City of Ghosts as it was really just overly cheesy and touristy. Filled with things like pay 10 yuan and find out what your son will do as his profession. But other than that, the boat was great and it was nice to have three nights in one place after all the time on the go. The gorges were definitely amazing with massive rock walls on both sides and we also traveled through a lock series like the Panama canal.

I’ve added to my souvenir collection and picked up a lovely embroidery to go with my Ching vase and globe. I’m going to need to move to a bigger place to house all my acquisitions!

Tomorrow will be a very long day. We have a four and a half hour bus ride in the morning to get to the train station. Then a 14 hour overnight hard sleeper train again. Ugh – back to the train pit toilets again!

Cheers!

Val