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Being hot, tired and miserable didn’t help my first impressions. It’s gotten a bit better.

It’s still gray and big and industrial, but I saw a few of the parks yesterday and let the Chinese gardens work their curvy magic on me. I also went to the central square, briefly admired the Mao statue, and started one of my stubborn, interminable urban hikes which took me several km away. Usually I feel that streetmaps in guidebooks overstate the size of cities: not so with Chengdu. After circumnavigating Sichuan University in an attempt to find Tex-Mex food, I found a bus back and had dinner and a shower (which both helped tremendously).

This morning I woke up relatively early. I spent the morning at the panda breeding center north of the city. I guess it’s a tourist must-do: there are definitely more pandas there than you’d tend to see in one place. Got a lot of photos, deleted a lot on the ride back, etc.

I hope my couchsurfing attempts in Japan get more successful because it seems like US$25 is about the bottom-line price for a dorm bed in the most crowded dorms available. Ouch. I prefer RMB 25 (what I’m paying now), though 45 or even 60 (Xi’an, Shanghai) would be fine too.

Sichuan food has not been disappointing… nice and spicy. If anyone from first semester at Lingnan is reading this: I found the “Christmas peppers” (all over my gong pao ji ding).

I saw some really interesting headlines on the BBC and NYTimes through my RSS reader, but I can’t actually read the articles (and I don’t want to get the g/h in trouble by scaling the Great Firewall). Bummer.

Today I will continue to be lazy around Chengdu (since I was tramping around peeking at pandas all morning). Tomorrow, I might try to get out to Leshan to see the Big Buddha there (look it up, it’s a bit older than Lantau’s): it depends on the bus timetables since I’ll need to be back here in the evening to catch my flight. It’s a two hour 34 RMB bus ride, so as long as it starts early enough that should work out fine.

Any HK people reading, please please please keep me up on your new and exciting lives. I’m still going through withdrawal.