Advertisement
Published: September 9th 2009
The Chairman!
The Chairman Mao statue in central Chengdu.Hello
Having a bit of a lazy time at the moment, recovery from the epic train journey!
Chengdu is very laid back and the temperature is much better for us. It has quite a tea house culture and the main park here is full of people doing fan dancing and playing music. Seems like it's a really good lifestyle for some of the older generation.
Yesterday we spent the day pottering around and went to the park for tea. Stuart had bamboo green tea and I had chrysanthamum tea. Mine was fairly sugary, but really tasty, not sure Stu was overwhelmed by his!! The tea house was very traditional just by the lake, we spent some time relaxing, but Stu kept getting pestered by people wanting to clean inside his ears with something resembling torture instruments (seems to be a very strange but common service here).
A massive Chairman Mao statue overlooks the town square. Just by there is an 'art museum' and 'science museum' - inverted commas since the art museum was completely empty and the science museum was not maintained and just really out of date! I think these might be relics of the Cultural
Tea in the Park!
Enjoying Chrysanthamum tea. Revolution from a few years ago. However we did get a good view of a police practice drill where they set off a pretend bomb.
Today was the highlight of the trip so far for both of us. We went to the Giant Panda Sanctuary. The Pandas were really chilled out and you were able to get quite close to them. At one point, we thought it was a man in a Panda suit because they behave in such a human way. They seem to have quite a similar lifestyle to us, eating, snoozing and chilling out. The Panda Kindergarten was hilarious, they weren't very good at climbing yet and seemed to be getting themselve into all kinds of trouble.
We were also able to see the babies in their incubators. A lot of the first time mums seem to reject or even hurt the babies because they're quite shocked by giving birth, so they have to take them away from them.
Hopefully you can view the video that we attach.
Love
Stuart and Lisa
Advertisement
Tot: 0.351s; Tpl: 0.023s; cc: 9; qc: 48; dbt: 0.0738s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
betty
non-member comment
panda
hey! LOVE the video! let's have more videos of you guys doing cool stuff! xb