Being hot, tired and miserable didn’t help my first impressions. It’s gotten a bit better.<\/p>\n
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).<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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).<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Any HK people reading, please please please keep me up on your new and exciting lives. I’m still going through withdrawal. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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