Panda Bears and Giant Buddha

I'm in Chengdu and having a really good time so far! I like it here better than Tianjin. The city is much more tourist-friendly and seems to be cleaner and easier to get around. Not to mention all the panda billboards, souveniers, and murals that are all over town!

Wednesday we made a trip to the Chengdu Panda Research Base, home to about 60 giant pandas as well as some red pandas. I was in heaven! The research base is very nice, set up like a large zoo. Each panda habitat is spacious and equipped with ample trees and wooden structures for climbing. Later in the morning, most of the pandas were moved indoors into the air-conditioning, because it was too hot outside for them! Whether indoors or out, everybody is supplied with an all-you-can-eat bamboo buffet all day long.

My favorite part of the day was our visit to the "Panda Kindergarten," where six cubs were rowdily wrestling and playing together on a huge jungle- gym outside. It was so cute that it was difficult to take pictures quickly enough. The panda reserve also has a section dedicated to premature newborn cubs, so we got to see two tiny little baby pandas in incubators. A few times, the cubs rolled around a little bit and stuck their tongues out... awwwwww....

After the panda reserve, we walked around downtown Chengdu's shopping center and found a Subway for lunch! This may not be anything special in the United States, but after seven weeks without a sandwich, Subway tasted amazingly good. That night for dinner, we had a great Italian meal, which is another type of food I've been craving throughout my stay in China. Half the reason I love Chengdu so much is because of the food.

Thursday Scott and I rode the bus to Leshan to see the world's biggest Buddha. The bus turned out to be an air-conditioned tour bus: much nicer than the old, beat-up city bus I'd been expecting. We had a "bus attendant" (like a flight attendant) who made sure everyone was comfortable by adjusting air vents and armrests and handing out blankets. She read all announcements in Chinese and English (even though Scott and I were the only English speakers on the bus) and at the end of the ride, everyone got a complimentary pair of...

NAIL CLIPPERS. :)

Once we arrived at the Buddha, Scott and I waited in line for about two hours to get close enough to him (him being the Buddha) to take pictures. "Waiting in line" as a tall American couple in China is an interesting experience... especially since the Chinese are not used to having an orderly line and will use every opportunity to cram in ahead of the line. We entertained ourselves by taking pictures of every Chinese person we saw taking our picture and staring back at everyone who stared at us. At one point, we saw a very overweight, blond, red-faced woman who was probably from Wisconsin. She actually reminded me a lot of my family's old 16-pound calico cat, Candy. Scott and I felt bad for her: she just looked so distressed and anxious; but at least everyone stopped looking at us for a minute when she walked by!

We snapped our pictures of the Buddha while avoiding being pushed into the river by overzealous Chinese tourists and headed back to Chengdu on the bus. Long day!

Today we took it easy: sleeping in and sandwiches at Grandma's Kitchen, another great American food restaurant. Tomorrow morning we are headed to Jiuzhaigou and Huanglong, two parks located about 10 hours' bus ride outside of Chengdu. We'll be gone until Wednesday, after which we'll be back at Sim's for about a week.

Chengdu

This morning I woke up refreshed, ready to explore Chengdu. Upon stepping outside, I was pleasantly surprised by the hostel, which I'd been too tired and grimy to notice last night. It's called Sim's Cozy Guest House, and it certainly lives up to the name. The place was founded by a Korean man and his Japanese wife, both of whom have backpacked extensively throughout Asia and noticed there was a lot to be desired in many of the hostels they stayed in. Sim's Cozy Guest House is a place that pays a lot of attention to all those small details that make a huge difference in a comfortable stay. On the grounds are a small library, a very helpful travel agency, clean bathrooms and showers, laundry facilites, a bar, internet access, and a restaurant serving Western- style food. The layout reminds me a little bit of the Swiss Family Robinson house at Disney World: it's got a lot of winding staircases, rugged-looking dark wood, and random fountains with comfortable yet woodsy recliners and benches to sit on. Even better, it's incredibly cheap. Last night we stayed in a dorm-style room with four beds for about $4 per person. Tonight, we're in an air-conditioned double room for $8 per person. Scott and I both love it here, and decided it would be our home base for the next couple of weeks.

After a McDonald's lunch and a consultation with the Sim's travel agent, we explored Chengdu's Culture Street (lots of panda souveneirs) and a beautiful temple surrounded by extensive gardens. For dinner we decided to ride the bus to Pete's Tex-Mex restaurant to assuage the six-week old craving we both had for some chips and salsa (Tianjin didn't have a single Mexican place)! On the bus, we met two Canadian backpackers who were also headed to Petes's. The four of us shared a table and told stories about our travels around the crazy country of China. And wow- quesadillas, nine-layer dip, chips, salsa, and an Oreo Flurry NEVER, NEVER have tasted so good! These are my staple foods at home (somehow I'm not fat) and I hadn't had any of them since June! It was amazing. Pete's even had bathrooms labeled "Cowboy" and "Cowgirl" and a giant mural of Mexican people painted on the wall.

So far, I'm enjoying Chengdu. Tomorrow we are going to the panda breeeding center... can't wait!

I'd better see a lot of really cute pandas in Chengdu...

The FSU study abroad program ended Sunday, so we left Tianjin at 6:45 am to catch the train to Beijing. From Beijing, we took the 11:20 K train to Chengdu, what was supposed to be a 30-hour ride. Chengdu is located in Sichuan Province, the home of the giant panda. There are several giant panda research bases outside Chengdu, one of which was the first stop on our agenda.

Getting the tickets for this trip was quite a struggle. Our travel agent at TFSU, "Herbert," proved to be somewhat of an imbecile. Instead of receiving our soft-sleeper tickets on the more modern T-train on July 31 as promised, Herbert delivered K-train hard sleeper seats to us no earlier than 11:30 the night before we would depart Tianjin.

We were worried about the K-train, which is an older and less comfortable model than the T-train. Our room was about 7'x10' and held two columns of three bunk beds each. The head space above each bunk got narrower going up: Scott had a top bunk and could only sit up halfway without hitting the ceiling. Each bed was about seven feet long and less than three feet wide. Our bunkmates were a woman and her three-year old daughter traveling home to Tibet, and an elderly man with his son and daughter-in-law, going home to Chengdu. Everyone was polite and courteous, but the Chinese don't hold the same regard for personal space that I'm used to. There were many invasions into my personal space bubble (which a lot of you know is very, very large). In an attempt to keep everybody calm, the train speakers broadcasted "relaxing" Kenny G renditions of such classics as Unchained Melody, I Will Always Love You, and What Child is This. Random!

Nonetheless, time went by. We played cards, read, chatted with people who wanted to practice their English, and got a decent night's sleep. The next day, I looked out the window and we were in the mountains! The scenery was beautiful: little streams ran amongst the hills and the lush greenery was dotted with quaint little farmhouses. I was really enjoying looking out the window and reading my book, congratulating myself on my good attitude about the train ride when, around 12:30 Monday afternoon:

THE TRAIN STOPPED ON THE TRACKS. AND WE SAT THERE. FOR FOUR HOURS. IN THE SAME SPOT.

By the time the train got underway again, my attitude had changed into one of complete hatred for the train and all the people around me in the train. The little girl who had previously been endearing and cute turned into an annoying little monster; the cozy bunk became hellishly hard, cramped, and dirty; the friendly Chinese people on the train became one mass of irritatingly curious faces. Suddenly I wanted to get off, desperately!

To further complicate matters, we were supposed to check into our hostel by 8 pm or we risked losing our room. After a series of attempted phone calls from the train to our helpless travel agent in Tianjin, he promised me that he ha secured an extended check-in until 11 pm. We rolled into Chengdu around 10:40. After pushing through the seething masses of people in the train station while clutching my purse to avoid pickpocketers, we wrangled a taxi from the hundreds waiting outside the stations and managed to get to the hostel by 10:55... only to find they had given our room away. Luckily, the hostel had dorm-style rooms left. Not quite as nice as what we had originally booked, but by that point we didn't care. We hadn't showered in two days and were both so tired we could barely stand up. I was so grateful just to have a bed! I made it to Chengdu- but all I'm saying, for all that effort- I'd better see a lot of really cute pandas this week!

Pan Shan and Chang Cheng

I spent this past weekend climbing, climbing, climbing. Saturday morning at 6:30, our whole program headed to Pan Shan, a mountain located about two hours outside of Tianjin in a rural, isolated region called Ji County. The mountain was beautiful, and we took a leisurely four hours to climb up to the top. On the way up, we encountered breathtaking scenery, a fascinating Buddhist burial ground, and several temples with very aggressive monks seeking donations.

For 50 yuan ($7) I took a cable car ride up to the very top of the mountain along with some other members of our group. We seemed to be rising above the clouds, although it was difficult to tell because of the thick mist accumulating in the high elevation. Another temple stood at the highest point of the mountain, and after taking some pictures and enjoying the lovely, fresh and clean air, we made the journey back down Pan Shan to eat lunch.

Lunch was served at "The Farmer's House," which was, quite literally, a farmer's house located at the end of a bumpy dirt road. The "restaurant" also doubles as a "hotel," at which Scott and I had been planning to stay Saturday night in order to visit a nearby section of the Great Wall. After taking a look around the place, however, we decided to go against the advice of our travel agent and seek more civilized lodgings closer to the town center.

The rest of the group went back to Tianjin Saturday afternoon. Since Scott and I still wanted to stay an extra night to climb the Great Wall today, our teacher helped us book a surprisingly great three-star hotel in downtown Ji County. For the even more surprisingly great price of 160 yuan (about $20) per night, we got cleanliness, air conditioning, real showers, and comfortable beds... we were in heaven!

Upon our arrival at the hotel, I had a hunch that Scott and I were the only non-Chinese in the entire town; that was confirmed when we ventured out to get dinner at the local KFC. Everyone we came into contact with was very helpful and friendly, but there was much staring, pointing, and loud shouting of "HAH-LOH!!" and "MEIGUOREN MA?" (are you American?). I'm finding more and more that a little bit of Chinese and a cheerful smile are the cure for all this. For example, I was standing in line to get a second box of chicken nuggets at KFC, being stared at intensely as usual. When I told a woman in front of me that her daughter was very cute (which she was), I was surrounded by instant new friends.

We'd arranged a cab to pick us up at the hotel and take us to the Great Wall (Chang Cheng) the next morning; he was there right on time at 7:30 am. The 40-minute cab ride was more like a dangerous roller coaster ride, but it was pretty fun all the same and we enjoyed the beautiful country scenery along the way. This section of the Great Wall was much more rugged than the more frequented one we'd visited outside of Beijing. The first side we climbed was extremely steep, and ended abruptly against a vertically rising cliff. To get to the other side of the wall, we crossed a river and then climbed up about 30 minutes of almost vertical steps with no railing cut into the mountainside. The view was well worth it, and the exercise felt great! Along the way, we talked to Chinese tourists about how we were Meiguoren and we all sympathized with each other about the rigorous climb.

After about four hours of climbing, Scott and I met the cab driver for the ride back into town. We collected our bags, got some lunch, and went to the local train station to get tickets back to Tianjin. The train station was located in a large warehouse-like room with no air conditioning and an outdoor communal pit for a restroom. We were excited (and a little apprehensive!) to find out that each ticket for the 2.5 hour ride back to Tianjin cost only 7 yuan ($1). The train ride on the circa- 1960 vehicle was an interesting experience. The seats seemed to be sold out at Ji County, but at each of the ten stops on the way to Tianjin we picked up more people, who had to just stand in the walkways. The restroom was a small box with a hole cut in the floor; passengers brave enough to enter the bathroom had the special treat of seeing the train tracks "whizzing" (haha) by underneath! Of course, Scott and I were the only non-Chinese on the train. Everybody was very curious to talk to us but we were feeling pretty anti-social and didn't bite. My postcard-writing attracted a crowd of people looking over my shoulder and trying to read the few Chinese characters I wrote on each card ("hello" and my Chinese name, "Mei Xiang").

I'm very tired and must go to sleep now. What a great weekend, and a wonderful introduction to the beginning of my career as a waiguoren (foreign) backpacker in China, which commences a week from today.

:)

Chinese Friends

Well, it's getting down to the wire. We leave Tianjin one week from Sunday, and I wish I had more time here! I've finally started to make some Chinese friends, which makes a world of difference in helping me get around town and function as a normal, capable adult should.

I've found my friendships here very refreshing. Chinese college students have a certain innocence that's hard to find in girls my age at home. The feeling I'm trying to describe is hard to put into words... but it brings back memories of carefree summer days spent with neighborhood friends by the pool, getting ice cream, and just wandering around the neighborhood goofing off. It's the kind of feeling that I didn't realize I missed until I got it back.

Of course, my Chinese friends and I do more adult things like shopping or going out to lunch, but it's that same kind of wholesome, good- natured fun that makes silly games like Ghost-in-the-Graveyard a blast. A return to childhood innocence, perhaps?

ANYWAY, these are a few of my new Chinese friends:

Suzi is my homestay friend from last weekend. She's very sweet and innocent, but has a huge crush on a Korean pop star. Other than the Korean boy, her dad is her idol and she hopes one day to become a translator. Suzi's a self-proclaimed "optimistic girl" who "loves to smile." Here is the last e-mail she sent me:

Janet,
I miss you..hahahow are you these days?It was really a good time you stayed with us.I will send you the photos,And,by the way ,dad said that if you have time ,he'd like to chat with you moreHe and my mother both miss you!
Well,it's late,I shall have a sleep now,best wishes to you!
yours,Suzi

Anny is Suzi's friend who hung out with us pretty much the whole weekend. She's a minority (non-Han Chinese) and a Muslim. On Saturday, she told me that she has a thing for German boys, because somehow she'd heard they're gentlemen. It just so happens that we have a German boy studying abroad with the FSU program... so we set them up on a group date. Last night Anny came over to the dorm a little early to get ready. Another FSU student, Sallie, and I did her hair and make-up beforehand... COMPLETE transformation- Anny looked gorgeous! Unfortunately, our German friend got sick last night but we rounded up some other boys for dinner and made the most of the situation.

Today, Anny sent me this cute e-mail:

Dear Janet,
I'm really really happy tonight! I know you and Sallie more deeply.You are both so kind girls that treat me by true heart.

Actually I don’t mind boyfriend. I just want to make friends.In China there is a sentence“We depend on parents at home ,but outside we need friends”. So please do not be angry with Farbien(not sure how to spell).I hope hell be better soon!

When I came back home,my mum and dad nearly can’t recognize me.Dad said,You’ve never been so pretty before. He~he~.So he wants to invite you and Sallie,of course the two lovely guys Jared and Brett to a famous Muslim restaurant named Hong Qi Shun.After I’m coming back from my sisters. I'll mail you,Ok?

Are all of you going to Pan Mountain this Saturday? And Sallie with other foreign friends will be back to USA on August 5th ,is that right? Please let me know.

I'm a fortunate girl to make good frinends with both of you .Thanks my friends tonight!!!
Loving you…
also your dear friend Anny

Shawna, my roommate Michelle, and I went shopping today. Shawna and I met at a mixer held for Chinese and American students my second week here. Since then we've had lunch, gone shopping, and I've got a pending invitation to dinner with her family next week. Shawna's very stylish and very "Western;" she doesn't like frilly clothes, knows what "lesbian" means (that was a pretty funny discussion!), and likes to go clubbing. She's an English major and working this summer as a dancer at a local restaurant (not sure exactly what that means); in August, she'll begin work as a translator for various Olympic teams.

Lena is my Chinese partner: she helps me with my Chinese while I help her with English. We've met a few times at Starbucks and she thinks my Chinese pronounciation is really funny (which I'm sure it is). Right now, Lena has three jobs and is enrolled in a Japanese class. I told her I never know what foods to order in restaurants, so she made me a five-page list of Chinese foods with characters and everything.

I love them all!

Host Family Weekend

This weekend, I stayed with a host family here in Tianjin. Their daughter, "Suzi," is a multinational business student at Tianjin Foreign Studies University, and just about the sweetest person I've ever met. From the minute I met her on Friday afternoon, I knew it was going to be a good weekend: she's very skinny, very friendly, and very very giggly. :)

After Suzi and her friend picked me up from campus, the three of us rode the subway about 25 minutes to her apartment, which was nicer than I expected and very, very clean. Suzi's family lives on the sixth floor of a building inside a gigantic apartment complex. Her bedroom is up in a loft; the kitchen, bathroom, master bedroom, living room, and a spacious balcony are located on the first floor. They had a computer and air conditioning (which unfortunately they didn't turn on much!) Suzi and I shared the queen-sized bed in her parents' room- they slept upstairs in her room so that I wouldn't be too hot.

I met her parents and gave them the Florida coffee table book and FSU souveneirs I'd brought as gifts. They politely looked through the book and displayed the Ziploc bag containing an FSU lanyard (yes I just said lanyard), garnet and gold juggling balls, and Seminole tattoos prominently on the living room table. After a chat, we all had dinner together: a duck and mushroom dish, rice, soup, fish, and several different vegetables. I made sure to exclaim "Hao Chi!" (Delicious!) on a regular basis. Suzi, her friend and I went for a walk down the street and wandered through the supermarket for a while. Later, I looked through some of the family's photo albums- there were several black and white pictures of Suzi's father and grandfather in Mao jackets and caps and tons of a little chubby-faced Suzi doing various cute things.

Saturday started bright and early at 7 am. After an interesting breakfast (a bowl of grease with egg floating in it), Suzi, another friend named "Anny," and I rode the light rail for about an hour to Tianjin's Economic Development Area, which also has a very nice riverside park. We met up with a fellow FSU student, her host family's daughter, and two more of Suzi's friends; the six of us wandered around the park and took tons of pictures. Later, we tried to go ice skating in a nearby soccer arena. The rink was closed, but the guard was nice enough to let us into the arena for a few minutes... everybody scampered around for a while, giggling and taking more pictures.

When we got back to Suzi's house, Anny decided to stay for dinner; we all sat down to a delicious dumpling dinner with her parents. After dinner, I chatted with her father for about two hours while Suzi translated for us. After a flurry of picture-taking with the family (including one of me for her dad's cell phone), we went to bed around 12.

In the morning, Anny came over for breakfast and brought some soup to share. The soup was colorless with a Jello-like consistency and olives and nuts added in. The girls served me a huge bowlful and watched me take my first bite. I almost gagged.. but put on a good face for them. As soon as they went into the kitchen for a moment, I scooped most of the soup back into the container and continued to talk about how good it was when the girls returned. Whew! Suzi made us a second dish- her favorite food- for breakfast, which I actually really enjoyed. It was kind of like a whole bowlful of hardboiled egg whites with salt, pepper, and another kind of seasoning added in. Sounds gross but I loved it!

After breakfast, the girls took me back to campus. We all parted ways with tons of hugs, air kisses, and promises to keep in touch through e-mail.

My chat with Suzie's father was the most interesting part of the visit for me. Her dad is a very intelligent man with a good knowledge of international news and current events, so it was really interesting to hear all of his impressions. He's worked as an electrician at a nearby factory for the past 20 years. Suzi's dad asked me all sorts of question about Americans' impressions of Bill Clinton, Monica Lewinsky, Japan, Pearl Harbor, WWII, the Korean War, Iraq, Taiwan, Virginia Tech, Chinese in the United States, Chairman Mao, and more. I tried to give diplomatic but honest answers, and I hope that I represented my country well! A couple of the tricky ones (Mao, Taiwan) I avoided answering for fear of giving an offensive response.

Suzi's dad told me the first phrase he learned to say in school was "Long live Chairman Mao." When I asked him about the modern Chinese impression of Chairman Mao, he responded with the standard Party line, "He was a great leader, but he made some mistakes." Interestingly, this is the same answer he gave when I asked him about his impressions of President Bush. I decided to be daring and asked what he thought about Tibet; he had no idea what I was talking about.

I also had a lot of fun hanging out with the girls. They were all just so sweet and full of questions about my life in the United States. After I told them about my house in Winter Springs, "three cats, one dog, four people" became a catch phrase for the rest of the weekend: every few hours, one girl would say it and set everybody off giggling. I taught them all how to French braid, we gossiped about boys, and did plenty of laughing. The whole weekend felt like an 8th grade sleepover!

On Friday night, Suzi decided that it was time for "girl talk." She told me about her "idol," a Korean pop singer; we talked about my boyfriend- she's never had one, although there are lots of boys are school who like her; she said her father is another one of her idols: he reminds her of a panda but he's also a very wise, learned man. Saturday night before we went to sleep, she sang me a good night song, which was so adorable I almost started to cry. At one point this weekend, she told me, "I am a very happy girl. I am almost never sad. My parents love me and my friends love me. What do I have to be sad about?"

It was so touching- and a lesson to my spoiled self- to see someone who had so few material possessions but yet was so content. Suzi and most of her friends all had some sort of link with the Western world: one girl's cousin studies at UC-Berkeley; another's relative is currently in London; another's father lives in Paris. They were so excited when I told them I'd been to Europe- I even showed them some of my pictures online. The girls seemed hungry for knowledge about the United States and life outside of China. I really couldn't help but wonder how their lives would have been different had they been born in the United States.

A Different Kind of Guanxi

Last night, Scott and I decided to try out the "Western Food" restaurant located on the third floor of the student cafeteria. The so-called "Western" menu items looked a little strange, so I ordered fried rice instead. As we were struggling to order in Chinese, a very nice English-speaking Chinese woman came to our rescue and also invited us to eat with her and her husband.

We chatted a little bit in Chinese but mostly in English. She's an English teacher at Tianjin Foreign Studies University, and he's a Ph.D. student in economics. It turns out that Tianhai Xie, my Chinese teacher at FSU, was her classmate. She taught in Houston for 9 months, and her husband will study in Australia next year. They both have traveled quite a bit around the eastern United States, so we chatted about general impressions like "New York City has a lot of people" and "Washington, D.C. is very historical." After dinner, we parted ways.

We have a world map in our classroom here at TFSU, and I look at the distance between Florida and Tianjin a lot. Little encounters like the one last night remind me that no matter where I am in the world, people are just people. For example, a random meeting between two young Chinese and two young Americans- in a third floor cafeteria... at Tianjin Foreign Studies University... in China- turned into a pleasant conversation about a mutual acquaintance and shared impressions of American cities. And to me, that's really comforting.