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Published: March 19th 2008
Chengdu - December 07
Chengdu is a enormous city but we hardly spent any time there, it was just a flying visit to go and see the panda breeding centre.
The hostel we stayed in was quality, the rooms were good, it had a bar and a nice restaurant at the front. the only downside was that being the middle of winter it was dead! We played this to our advantage though with cheaper beds in a empty dorm room, saving us 3 pounds, cashback! We booked our panda trip for the following day and then I went out for a look around whilst Gill had a snooze.
We headed for the pandas the next morning and got there about 9am just in time for feeding. It's the panda's livelist time of day before they disappear again to sleep (similar behaviour to Gill!)
The bamboo is strategically placed so that the big fellas are just a few yards in front of the tourists and they are happy to munch away infront of you which is quite entertaining.
There isn't much else to see in Chengdu so we decided to leave the next morning, I treated Gill
that night to a romantic evening of Liverpool v Man U ! ( for the record 1-nil to Utd, Tevez ! ) Earlier we had been to a 'Huoguo' restaurant, this is the chinese version of hotpot, my god is it hot! You have a huge pot of chilli broth bubbling away infront of you on a heater in the middle of the table, into this you throw your own ingredients in to cook, so you are your own chef ! We quickly realised that the restaurant owner had used all of his best English to entice us into his establishment and that ordering would be a problem as the menu was just in Mandarin ! A comedy couple of hours followed, first of all i walked round with the owner pointing at other peoples food to give him an idea of what we wanted , then into the kitchen, the chefs were very amused ! Leaving it in his hands we could have ended up with dog, fishheads or chicken feet , sometimes looking really stupid is a good thing !
The Chinese do have a habit of staring at you as foriegners, they also seem to like
watching you use chopsticks almost knowing that it is going to go pear-shaped with food ending up on the floor any second. I spotted one guy doing this as he stumbled drunk out of the restaurant with his mates ( strange for the chinese ), he was watching Gill closely ( she couldn't see this as she had her back to him ) as she attacked some Broccoli from the soup. On the 3rd attempt Gill nearly had it in her mouth and then disaster struck as the Broccoli escaped the chopsticks bouncing on the table before finding the floor . This fella roared with laughter ! I was laughing just because of how funny he found it , his mates hadn't spotted it , to let them know what had happened he made a really funny hand chopstick gesture while pointing at a red-faced Gill who then had 5 Chinese fellas and me all laughing at her ! One of them 'you had to be there' moments , brilliant.
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Vicky
non-member comment
Glad to see you're keeping up with your sleep Dolan!