Yes, it's a panda. Go on, say "aaaaaaaaaaahhhh!" Everyone else did!
Got up freakin' early.
Pandas are strange creatures, I'm having difficulty coming to terms with this concept. They're fully alert from about 6am to maybe 10-11am, then they sleep for most of the rest of the day. I mean, what's that all about? I am not, and never have been, a morning person.
The bus ride to the Chengdu Panda Research Centre took about thirty minutes, it's actually a pretty large place but much of it seems to be pretty empty enclosures, and a bird lake.
Anyway. We had a wander around the park for a couple of hours. First up were the red pandas, not really pandas at all but more a kind of racoon - I'll be the first to admit I'm no biologist so the family hierarchy of the many panda species leaves me a bit cold!
Unfortunately they didn't seem to be terribly active as we walked past, so we quickly moved on to the true pandas. The first one we really saw was quite happily lying around on his own, eating a bit, playing to the cameras a bit. They are naturally shy creatures but I suppose being looked at by so many tourists makes them come out of their bamboo forest a bit!
Then we went through a kind of maternity ward. Pandas don't breed with any great voracity; indeed the female panda is only on heat for maybe one or two weeks a year! Early autumn tends to be the time that pandas are born, so we got to see some really young pandas in incubators and being tended to by the research staff! Pandas only tend to raise one child; the maternity ward not only has mother/baby units, but also small units where second babies, rejected by the mother, are raised by human hands.
So, pandas are solitary animals, mate once a year if they can find a mate, and only have one kid. And you wonder why pandas are an endangered species??!?!?!
Finally, we saw pandas at play, a mother and unusually two child pandas, rolling around on a sort of climbing frame, and climbing up and down the trench that lay just beyond the fence below where we were standing. Pandas born and bred in the research centre can sometimes be encouraged to keep more than one cub, though even here it is rare.
We looked around the museum/information centre too; although many of the information panels were about five years old, which was a bit of a shame. It was quite interesting nevertheless, as it showed the history of the panda, and told about a panda's lifestyle and eating habits etc. There was also a bit about the history of the centre itself.
Upon returning to Chengdu City Centre, we stopped off at one of the local Buddhist monasteries (the Wenshu Temple). It wasn't terribly big, but was quite ornate, with the obligatory Buddhas and the burning of incense. In this part of China there are a lot of monasteries and temples, indicating the influence (and indeed power) that religion has over the people. Although predominantly a Buddhist region, Islam does have some hold here too.
We had lunch there; initially we were going to eat in the slightly expensive tearoom area, but then we decided instead to eat in the cheaper outdoor area. It being Buddhist, the food was purely vegetarian, but, using tofu, the in-house monks create a rather strange food sensation by making it look, feel, and taste similar to whatever it is supposed to represent. Most of us went for the local "Spicy Sichuan Chicken" with rice. All I will say as a result is that maybe the Trades Descriptions Act ought to be enforced in Chinese restaurants up and down the length of the UK. This was real Sichuan food; most people in the group could only manage a few mouthfuls before their taste-buds waved a white flag!! I did manage to eat all mine but then I was noted for my lack of taste ... !!
We finished up having tea in the nearby tea garden; 8 Yuan for 'all you can drink', they kept coming up and refilling your cup. Flower teas; jasmine and lavender tended to be the most common but also green tea and a few others. Still think it's quite dull, mind! And I still haven't got used to their lack of sugar. Oh for a cup of Moroccan mint tea!!
After milling around the hotel for an hour or so, three of us (me, James, and Alan) set off for the statue of Chairman Mao at the centre of Chengdu. James seems to have a socialist obsession - he does seem to have left-wing leanings and he did buy Chairman Mao's little red book from a stall in Yangshuo ... !
It was a reasonable walk, past sports shops (Inter Milan top for £8?!) and the sports stadium (I assume football as it's pretty big in China), but we eventually made it. The statue overlooks a large grassy square at the intersection of two major thoroughfares. A few local Chinese youngsters came by and wanted to take our photographs!
Apparently the statue in Chengdu is one of the few remaining Mao statues in China. This is not because of a re-appraisal and dismissal of Mao's work, it's more simply and practically to do with advancement and progress. The statues were generally built in prime development land and were taken down to increase opportunities for buildings and commercial structures. Mao himself, being the pragmatist that he was, would probably have appreciated the irony, although one does wonder how he would react if he knew that his statue in Chengdu overlooks a large branch of McDonalds ... !!!
A brief but strange point. All the taxis were Citroen AX's, and were emblazoned in one of two colour schemes. Yellow/bright green, or yellow/sky blue. We never figured out why, nor what the difference was between the two.
We wandered back to the hotel via a branch of Carrefour, that French supermarket chain. One day I hope we have regular Carrefours in England; it is my supermarket of choice in France. (This may well be because Laure doesn't shop elsewhere very often - we went to a Gèant in Poitiers once but I wasn't impressed. Merely a Safeway compared to a Sainsbury's - no contest!) Anyway. It was freakin' crowded! We actually got lost a couple of times; it's built on a number of levels and getting from one to another without a map is tricky. Getting *inside* took enough trouble as it was! There were* maps, actually, but they just didn't seem to make a lot of sense .... ! We bought a few biscuits, long bus journey tomorrow, with the chickens!
We ate in a small but genuine restaurant just across the small side-road from the hotel. We had a variety of local dishes, including "Chicken with chilli and peanuts" (quite spicy), and "Twice-cooked pork", which is boiled or roasted first, then fried. This is in fact what I often do at home anyway when I've cooked a big pork joint that takes me most of the rest of the week to eat! Reminds me, I have all kinds of things to eat in my freezer at home, must do something with them. The general consensus was that this food was the best we'd eaten en route thus far.
The rest of the evening was then spent in a large marquee tent, during a rainstorm, watching a selection of genuine and ethnic Sichuanese theatre!! We had all kinds of entertainments, from "the unique skills of puppets" (where puppets and marionettes danced very technically and expertly), to dancers with ever-changing masks (discussion raged afterwards as to how they'd changed their faces so quickly so often without appearing to do anything! We suspect it might have been through the sly use of pulling cords), to music performances (one person playing this local two-stringed instrument - whose technical name escapes me but hopefully someone will be able to tell me what it was - and making it sound at times ethereal - think Vangelis - and at other times rock - think early Andrew Lloyd Webber! We also got a bit of an ethnic tale of a wife punishing her unfaithful husband which, although performed in Chinese, could easily be watched by us foreigners. It was clear to see what was going on, and while we didn't understand the words it was easy to get the context and content. Some forms of art traverse the barriers of language.
For 50 Yuan you could have a massage at the sides of the tent while watching the performance. I didn't, but some of the others (including Radka) did; apparently it felt good but the masseurs pushed down hard on the skin.
As the night went on, I spent an hour or so back at the hotel with a couple of the others, in the "karaoke bar". No-one sang; in fact we were the only people in there (except for the bartender and his friend). Behind us the videoke screen played the same few songs endlessly, including "This song will go on" by Celine Dion, "Without you" (the bastardised Mariah Carey version), and "Right Here Waiting" by Richard Marx. Middle of the Road or what?!?!?