After Lijiang I flew to Chengdu (still not ready to travel by night train…) where I spent a night alone in a hostel until my friend arrived the next day! This time I choose to book a room on my one in the hostel… I had been sleeping in 6 and 8 bed rooms the last days and felt the urge to have my own room, shower and western toilet for one tiny night! (U guys can’t imagine how I enjoyed that night!!! I showered over and over again and probably used all of their hot water reserves…but who cares...)
Chengdu is lies in the Sichuan Province which is famous for its spicy food (Hot Pot -> spicy Chinese fondue… Sichuan Dish -> A big bowl full of Chillies and below, very hidden, some pieces of meet or fish… depending on what you order…)
When it comes to Sightseeing, Chengdu or the Sichuan Province in general, don’t let you get bored easily! There is the Panda Breeding Research Base (Pandas are the national icon of China), the big mountain Emei Shan and Leshan (the Big Buddha can be found there..) and a lot more!!
Panda Breeding Research Base:
Bamboo is very low in nutrients, so pandas need to spend around 16 hours a day munching trough almost 40kg of the stuff in order to stay healthy.
Well that seems pretty hard to believe for me… I wasn’t able to finish my little bamboo sprout..
Another attempt of me to be a Panda...
So we went veeeeeery early in the morning (I had to get up at 7!!!!! Can you believe that??) to that panda place! This because the life of a panda consists of eating and sleeping… that’s pretty much it… So guess what they did after the 9 o’clock munch… yeeaahhh… zzzZZZZzzZZZ
The Pandas were really cute… look at the pictures!! (btw. There was the possibility to hold (more like touch) a panda baby for about 2-4 minutes… for the fair price of CHF 150.- ;) which a lot of my american friends did… I didn’t!!!)
Adult Panda doing what he does best...
sweet little baby pandas :)
another kind of panda.. called the "pink-fluffly-hair" panda... or something like that...
Also we went to Leshan (happy Mountain) and walked around for a day. This is where we probably saw about 1000 different Buddhas… but the most important was the Big Buddha (1200 years old) which is supposed to be the biggest Buddha in China. He is 71 meters tall, his ears stretch for 7 meters and each of his big toes is 8.5 meters long..
The last evening before taking off to the train station (yes, we planned to take the night train to Xi’an) we wanted to eat seafood! So we went to a seafood street market and entered a restaurant and asked them for the price of each animal which can be found in the sea.... after comparing some prices we asked him if we also could bring him some raw seafood and if he would cook it for us, as his portions seemed very small and overpriced… As his “cooking-fee” was only CHF 2.- per dish, we finally just went into the fish street market across the street, bought some small lobsters and squids and brought them to the restaurant, where they prepared our delicious dinner :)
