Don't Make the Pandas Angry

Hello, lI am back. Sichuan was absolutely breathtaking – by far the most beautiful place I have ever seen. The train ride was very pleasant – we had sleeper booths, which was kind of nifty. I was on top, and climbed up and down so much my classmates kept calling me “monkey.” We kind of all had monkeys on the brain, since we’d been warned about the wild monkeys of Emei Shan, who will steal your glasses and camera and rummage through your bag looking for food. I passed a very pleasant thirty-odd hours reading What Maisie Knew, looking at the beautiful and varied Chinese countryside, listening to music, and sleeping. Here are some things you can buy on the train from Beijing to Sichuan:
· Very spicy ramen noodles
· Fireproof socks
· Toothpaste
· Playing cards
· Musical gyroscopes
· Hard boiled eggs
Our hotel in Chengdu was very nice, with extremely comfortable beds. Our first day, we went to Dujiangyan, a very large, very old irrigation facility. The weather was wonderful, and we wandered around in t-shirts, eating ice cream and taking pictures. After lunch, we went to Qingsheng Shan, a sacred Taoist mountain. Most people took the cable car up, but I and about ten other people went on foot, passing other hikers and pilgrims and the occasional shrine or temple. Sichuan is famous for its fog, so the view from the top wasn’t too spectacular, but it was very beautiful anyway.

The following day, we went to Leshan to see the giant Buddha. It is indeed a very large Buddha, far and away the largest I have ever seen. That evening we went out for xiao chi, which is supposed to be a Sichuanese specialty, but I was disappointed that none of it was very spicy. Sichuan food is famous for spiciness, but our tour guides had arranged all our meals to not be spicy, and it was a little vexing.

Third day, third mountain – Emei Shan, one of China’s most important Buddhist mountains. A group of people went all the way to the top, but I didn’t – I didn’t have the right equipment or anything. Emei Shan was very beautiful and sacred and full of wild monkeys. “Do not touch him! Do not touch him!” a monkey-staff person told me.

“I am really, really not going to touch him,” I replied.

At the base of Emei Shan we had a really horrible lunch of flavorless, slimy tofu cubes, bitter greens, and fish that had seen better days. To make up for it, that evening a large group of people went to a Tex-Mex restaurant in Chengdu: Peter’s. It was quite expensive, as foreign food tends to be in China, but it was well worth it. Fajitas, nachos, half a strawberry margarita – I am aware that I am in China but I still have another six months of mapo dofu and xihongshi chao jidan, one night of Tex-Mex isn’t going to kill me.

The next day Lili, Kangrei and I went to see the giant pandas. They were extremely cute, so cute one can almost forgive them for their stubbon refusal to thrive – they will only mate once a year, they rarely mate in captivity, of China’s hundreds of types of bamboo they will only eat a couple, and if she gives birth to twins, the mother will generally kill one of them. This is not good planning, pandas. That evening we went to what the hotel staff claimed was the most authentic Sichuanese restaurant available. I am in no position to doubt it – we had slippery black noodles that burned my throat and set my ears on fire, shrimp chuan, mapo dofu, sweet and hot tofu, and all of it was so hot I had to slowly sip corn-flavored yogurt beverage and rice, and the tears poured down my cheeks. It was great.

Thursday I went by myself to Wenshu Yuan, an ancient but still active Buddhist monastary in the center of Chengdu. It was very lovely and quiet and peaceful. There were middle aged women doing tai qi, worshipers chanting and burning incense, and monks (both male and female) with their shaved heads and brown and yellow robes. I spent a long time there, drinking green tea and writing in my journal, and had lunch in their vegetarian restaurant. The Chinese are masters of fake meat – I had pea leaves (which made me miss my mother) and a strange dish consisting of onions, cucumber, and fake meat ranging from odd looking but realistically-textured fake shrimp to what I could absolutely swear was roast duck skin, complete with fat, to completely unidentifiable reddish, spongelike cubes. Very strange. That evening I went with a large group of ACC students to a rather fancy Sichuanese restaurant, which was great fun, since my roommate was there and she is one of the world’s funniest people. She is the sort of person, moreover, who inspires those around her to unusual levels of funniness, so it was a very merry meal.

Yesterday, our last day in Sichuan, Lili and I visited the home of ancient Chinese poetess Xue Tao, where we looked at bamboo and accidentally ordered the world’s most expensive tea. We sat with our tea and talked for a very long time to get our money’s worth out of these tea leaves, which were good, but tea is tea, really. Then we returned to the neighborhood of our hotel and bought incredibly, almost fatally spicy tofu kebobs from a street vendor and made friends with a Chinese girl who showed us the way to the post office.

So that was Sichuan. I’m sick now, so I think I’ll be taking it easy for awhile, but apart from that I feel great – very rested and centered and ready to return to the mammoth task of learning this peculiar language.