Today, I Spent $90 on Hugs

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This morning, after breakfast, we took a drive from our hotel, deep in the city, to a less urban part of Chengdu. It was there, after eight days in China, that we got to see the cuddliest of Sichuan province's specialties; the panda.
I've never seen a panda that wasn't on television or in a picture, so I was extremely excited about today's visit to the Chengdu Giant Panda Research Center, which also houses several other endangered animals, and is the home of the world's largest and most successful panda breeding facility.
The Chinese call the panda "xiongmao," or "bear-cat," the reason being that the animals a panda most resembled to the first observers were, of course, a bear and a cat. You might not think the panda looks especially like a cat, I didn't, but by the time the Chinese made note of pandas the cat was a domesticated house-animal, and denying the similar habits of the two species is a hard thing to do once you've seen the way they live. When we walked into the park, the first two pandas we all noticed were, first, hanging from a branch as though it had just run a marathon and simply couldn't be bothered to sit up without help, and second, lounging in quite the same way Homer Simpson might, munching away on bamboo without a care in the world.
The World Wildlife Fund, which has used the panda as a mascot since its inception in 1961, now defines the panda as the world's rarest breed of bear, and works with the Chinese government, and the branch thereof which operates the Center, to help maintain a reasonable habitat for the pandas in China and to utilize the national pride in pandas for the perpetuation of this species and other endangered animals.
However, not many of the facts and commendations of the park got much notice today, as we spent most of our time at the park hugging pandas, taking pictures of pandas, filming pandas, and buying things that had pandas on them. The work the Center does and its profound effect on the well-being of the panda population are fantastic things, but overall, I think I speak for the group when I say we were really just happy to spend a day at what was essentially a research-zoo full of giant and red pandas. A pair of us took pictures holding the youngest pandas at the park, only a few months old ($150 USD), a larger group took pictures petting adolescent pandas around 2 years old ($75 USD), and a some of us took pictures with the much smaller, but still patently adorable, red pandas on our laps ($15 USD). The trip hasn't been stressful by any means, but having a few hours to walk around a lively park and not only see, but hold, endangered pandas was definitely a relaxing, fun way to learn a little more about China.
After the Center, we had lunch at a fully vegetarian restaurant called Fresh Water Lotus at Wen Shu Fang. The lunch was filled with dishes that looked like animal, and sometimes even mimicked the texture, among more obviously vegetarian fair of tofu dishes and fruit plates. The restaurant is lauded as the best vegetarian house in Chengdu, and serves those who eat only vegetarian fair for dietary or religious reasons.
Fresh Water Lotus sits at 5 Bai Yunshi Street in Chengdu, a street lined with large buildings with their own individual courtyards. Each building held several establishments, and one of those was the tea house where we sat and played ma jiang for a few hours, drank tea, and later took one of our practical quizzes. The streets around the tea house were almost overflowing with vendors selling every flea-market item you could think of, and by the end of the outing, roughly half of us had bought new ma jiang sets.

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