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Published: July 20th 2005
Note: I apologize for not blogging more often the last few days...it's been crazy with the travel rush and difficult to find internet access for more than a few minutes.
My full day in Chengdu, Sichuan (or Szechuan) Province started with a trip to the Panda Breeding Center in the City of Chengdu. Apparently it's a top tourist attraction. Alas, I am not alone in my craze for large charismatic animals. While the idea that pandas are used as an economic and political tool leaves a bad taste in my mouth, it does serve to raise awareness and increase conservation effort for this marvelous species and its important habitat. With that as the preface, I don't quite feel bad that I was one of the lucky ones who was able to pose for photos with a baby panda bear while it was distracted with consuming the unnatural snack of juicy apples. Well hey at least it's advertised that the $50 I paid for the photo op is going to the research effort of the center (minus the service fee paid to the tour guides, keepers, Chairman Mao, and the thirty administrators in between). But the important thing here, you must keep in mind, is that I got to touch the cute and cuddly panda bear. Nevermind that pandas used to be kept as fighting animals by the Chinese emperor or that it's an opportunistic carnivore. It's damn cute.
I also met a woman from Shenzhen, the silicon valley of China. She highly recommends the city for anyone who is entrepreneurial, as she claims it is the city in China that is most free for capitalism (presumably excluding Hong Kong and Macao). She also said there's a beach there. Sounds better than San Jose already!
All the native Chinese people I talked with said that they go to Chengdu strictly to eat the local cuisine, one of the four revered ciusines of China (yes folks, there is not just one type of Chinese cuisine; there are the four major ones, namely Pekinese, Shanghainese, Cantonese, and of course Szechuan...okay five, the other being Panda Express variety, including chop suey and fortune cookie). So today I truly understand why the Szechuan cuisine is so famous. The noodles here are fantastic. Simply the best Chinese noodles I have ever had, and for 75 cents I got a hot pot of oily broth, plus two dishes of rice noodles and vegetables/meats/condiments to mix in the soup right at the table. It's like Vietnamese pho and Chinese hotpot all rolled into one. The legend has it that it was invented by a loving wife who figured out that a layer of oil on the soup kept it hot so that her husband, too busy to leave the study, would have hot noodles despite her long chilly walk to the study from the kitchen on a cold winter's day (it snows in Szechuan). Of course all other side dishes I ordered were tongue-searing spicy, true to the Szechuan style. Those of you who know, I sweat up a storm when I think of chilies, let along eating it. I created a massive pile of soaked tissue paper on the table, which was shared with two policemen (side note: anywhere where Chinese policemen eats lunch is a good palce to eat in China...you can make whatever conjecture you want about that, but officially I have no opinions about Chinese civil servants).
One last note: the huge internet cafe here operates 24 hours and serves drinks and even full-fledged dinner. I think people here are addicted to internet chatting and gaming and videoing streaming. There's even a magazine here dedicated to internet friendships. Given the higher ratio of men to women here in China, perhaps women here can have multiple internet boyfriends and thus solve the demographic crisis. Okay, enough random thoughts for today. I had planned to be at this internet cafe for an hour and now it's four hours later.
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Christine B (edaw)
non-member comment
Keep up...
Keep up the food reports! I love hearing about foods from different places. It's only 9:45am here and I'm craving the noodles you've described...mmmmmmm....