As I was just rereading my own posts, I realized I had forgotten to mention my stop in Chendu. I had been in Chengdu a few years ago and it didn't really do anything for me. This time, I had a better time.

We arrived early in the day on an overnight sleeper from some unknown city. Sleepers are always fun because you meet local people. On this particular journey, our fearless leader Mark had brought along a mini mahjong set. This created a major stir among the nearby Chinese! A few came over and started coaching Anthony on what tiles to keep and discard. I quickly yelled pianren, which means "cheater." It wound up not making a difference though because everyone seemed capable of playing on their own.

After we settled into our swanky hotel and hit the Wushu Temple (great fake meat dishes at their veggie restaurant), Ant and I headed out to Renmin Park. We saw people playing cards in the middle of the lake on miniboats, kids running around with fake machine guns, and this little boy drawing. I thought he was doing really well since he was only about 9 years old.

Also in Chengdu, we visited the infamous Panda Research Center, which was also improved since my last visit. Now they seem more educational and are focusing on the pandas' breeding habits. As it turned out, we were in town for the extremely brief (3 days/yr) mating season and you could hear the male pandas bleating like sheep. The Center has been very successful in helping the male panda overcome its penile limitations with some panda porn (I'm not kidding) and they have several panda cubs. Cute aren't they?

Also in the Center are many red pandas which are much smaller in size.

After spending the day wandering around, we had dinner at an excellent restaurant and topped off the evening with a trip to the Sichuan Opera. Actually, there isn't much opera involved. They had only a segment with these characters. The rest of the night was master puppetry (think Being John Malkovich quality but with Chinese puppets), horse fiddling, and a changing faces act. Changing Faces is an act where the performer had on a ton of masks and you can never catch them changing it. One second they have a red demon face and next a yellow warrior. I watched carefully and I couldn't catch them. Another act was shadow puppetry, which sounds really dull, but wasn't. The man who does it has really creative ways of going from one to the next and leaves the whole audience gasping. All in all, a quality show.

After my second visit, I decided I do like Chengdu. :)

OH! I also found two photos from the market that I took in Lijiang so here they are:

Naxi women chillin

A cute little old man I met