A Week of Travels: Part Two

Hello everyone and happy holidays! It is currently Christmas day in Shanghai and I thought I would sit down with a cup of Americano and finish part two of my week of travels in China.  In my last post I described the adventures my friends and I had in Beijing.  So I will start where I left off.  

We landed in Chengdu, which is a city located in the Sichuan province.  The main things to do near Chengdu are to visit the Panda sanctuary or visit the Giant Buddha in Leshan. Since neither my friends or I had any interest in Panda's 熊猫 Xióngmāo, except perhaps what they tasted like, we settled for the latter.  The site of the Giant Budhha in Leshan, although very touristy, is quite interesting and a definite site to see if one is in Chengdu.  The next day we visited a park in Chengdu and spent the day sipping tea at one of the parks many tea houses and watched the many activities that were taking place throughout the park. Such as Taji Sword, opera, various forms of dance; including hip-hop, calligraphy, Mahjong; a very popular game involving illustrated tiles, and of course karaoke.  That night after a fantastic diner, Sichuan food is by far my favorite style of food in China, we were tired from the day's events but it was 万圣节 Wànshèngjié Halloween, so we decided to see what Halloween was like in Chengdu.  Surprisingly Halloween was pretty well represented in Chengdu.  The street we visited was decked out in Halloween decorations with screams and howls reverberating throughout and many interesting monsters and ghouls walked amongst the crowd.  We ducked into an outdoor riverside restaurant and it was there we meet a Chinese cop and preceded to spend the rest of the night talking with him and his family.  I wish I had a picture, but this guy and his family were great and made Halloween in China an unforgettable experience, an experience that you will need to ask me about in person.

After Chengdu we took an over night train to Kunming, a city in Yunnan province, were we spent a few days before heading back to Shanghai.  I will let the pictures explain the rest of trip.  I will post again soon about my visits to Huangshan (yellow mountain) and Xihu (west lake). Until next time

Cheers! 

What I would look like if I only ate Sichuan food.

Giant Buddha

Wow look at that 帅哥, truly 高富帅 haha 

Thanks for the reminder

Can you spot the foreigners? At a tea house in Chengdu

This was my favorite part of our week of traveling.  At first glance you may ask how could an almost 24 hour train ride on hard seats be remotely enjoyable.  Well this was my favorite part of the trip because it was truly a real Chinese experience.  We sat in the cheap seats with the majority of the rural Chinese passengers, ate our bowls of instant noodles like everyone else, and added our own noises to the load music and voices that circulated throughout the train car.  Since we were the only foreigners on the train and the fact that many of the passengers had never seen a foreigner before, we attracted quite a bit of attention. One particular man that was leaning on an adjacent seat openly stared at us for an hour.  By the time night fell we had started a small party in our section of the train car and I meet my Chinese grandma, whom I have my arm around in this picture.  I also really enjoyed this experience because I only spoke Chinese to these people, it was the only way we could communicate, and so I feel that this particular experience helped greatly with encouraging me to speak Chinese outside of the classroom.

These gates were located in the city of Kunming, Yunnan.  In WWII U.S. Army troops and vehicles passed through these gates to deliver supplies to the Chinese resistance fighting the Japanese forces occupying China.  My friends and I did not do very much in Kunming except relax at a SPA and eat Kunming street food, I got food poisoning again haha.  The SPA experience was a little interesting because the main hot spring did not allow bathing suits, just your birthday suit, and in the center of the main hot spring their was a very large and anatomically correct sculpture of a phallus, which I am told is a symbol of power in Asia.  Anyway Kunming is a great city to visit, the food is delicious and it is simply just a great place to walk around in.