Advertisement
Spicy Chickeny Sichuan Food
This was yummy and hot but had these weird berries that make your tongue tingle and go numb. At first we thought we had been poisoned by realised later that these berries were an integral part of Sichuanese food. Tibet is a beautiful place and very awe inspiring - but enought already!!! No more monks and no more monasteries were the cries of our hearts as we made our way to the airport today. It was onward to China, land of cheap oily and greasy food that could only make us fatter.
Our destination for today was Chengdu, the capital of the Sichuan province. Sichuan is known for many things, but most importantly for extremely hot spicy food, giant pandas and super green scenery.
We got to experience the beauty of the Sichuanese scenery first hand from 10000ft in the air as we flew over 6000m high mountains. It was amazing how green these mountains were - greener than the greenest green tree we had both ever seen.
We arrived at Chengdu airport and were greeted with an ultra modern little building complete with automatic flushing toilets and automatic taps in the bathrooms. And it was all so clean!! Could this really be China. What happened to the stinky, dirty images that we had built up in our minds?
Anyway, our first chore was to find the Public Security Bureau to get a visa extension. Unfortunately,
Sichuanese Hot Pot
Its like steam boat, except the soup is really really really hot - so hot that I was dripping sweat all over the table. to enter Tibet, we had to forfeit the original chinese visa that we had obtained in Australia and exchange it for a dodgy 8-day group visa (where Melenie and I were considered a group of 2). This was because the Chinese government likes to make it difficult for tourists to enter Tibet and thus insists that everybody enters only on an official tour. We were assured in Kathmandu that once we arrived in the 'real' China (eg. Chengdu), it would be a trivial matter to get a 30 day visa extension at the local Public Security Bureau (PSB).
But oh dear!! We couldn't find the PSB. Half an hour of frantic scrambling around the airport asking official looking guys in terrible chinese where the PSB was located was only greeted by assertions that there was no PSB in the airport. We had been told by the Kathmandu people NOT to leave the airport without getting our extension - apparently getting your extension outside the airport is difficult. Alas we had no choice, so muttering numerous prayers (interpolated with numerous curses regarding terrible things that could happen to the hair of our Kathmandu travel agent), we hopped into a taxi
Richshaw dude
Poor chaps. They work hard for their money. One guy took us for a drive for about 1km. By the end up it, he was dripping in sweat. and headed off to our hotel.
The hotel staff was great at calming us down and helping us feel confident that we could get our visa extension. They simply just laughed in our face and said 'with this kind of visa - impossible. You will have to fly to Hong Kong and get an extension. You've got about a 30% chance of success!!'. To make matters worse, the PSB was closed today and tomorrow (Saturday and Sunday), so we'd have to endure 2 horrid days of waiting before we could discover our fate. Worse still was our visa would expire on Tuesday, so if on Monday they told us that they wouldn't extend our visa, then we'd have exactly one day to make the 2000km journey to Hong Kong!!
Well, you can imagine how depressed we were feeling at that point, so we deicided to do what all depressed people should do - stuff our faces with food. And what better place than China, where the food is dirt cheap and super tasty - right? Wrong. Alas, many of the restaurants didn't have English or picture menus, and most of the reasonably priced ones didn't have english speaking waiters. We spent about an hour walking from restaurant to restaurant begging for an english menu but alas were each time met with either a laugh or a look of confusion. We discovered later that the phrase we were using to ask whether they had an English menu was actually incorrect (thanks Desiree for misleading us!!) so who knows what we were asking. However, we finally found a dodgy looking place where the staff kind of spoke English and managed to order some bowls of rice and some Sichuanese chicken dish.
Sichuanese food is hot, and this chicken was no exception. Copious amounts of water were consumed. At one point, Melenie's tongue and throat went numb and she thought she had been poisoned. I tried to calm her down, but then suddenly my entire tongue started to fizzle and go numb as well!! We discovered shortly that they use this weird berry in Sichuanese cooking that makes you go numb - no idea what it is - but it kind of tastes gross and isn't particularly pleasnt. Nevertheless, the food was tasty, and at the price we paid, we couldn't argue.
That night, we watched some Chinese opera on TV. It's the funniest thing we've ever seen. I'm guessing we probably saw a bad example, but the one we saw basically had a guy who looked like a girl basically screeching in falseto and sporadically dropping in a deep drone for a couple of seconds. It was weird - probably very touching and moving to the educated listener. But to us - just sheer comedy worthy of laughing at for at least a good 10 minutes.
Tomorrow we would head off to Leshan, a town about 2 hours from Chengdu where the have the worlds tallest monolithic Buddha statue.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.034s; Tpl: 0.01s; cc: 8; qc: 23; dbt: 0.0174s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb