13 years ago Eddie lived in Chengdu, China. He's been heartsick to get back to Chengdu since we moved to Beijing just over a year ago. The pandas, the gardens, the food... It was with great excitement that we took off on Thursday 4 April to Sichuan Province or the "Heavenly State" to visit the gateway to Tibet.
Our first stop was to Ancient Town where we welcomed the first day of the Quingming Festival - or the Tomb Sweeping Festival. The Quingming Festival begins on the 104th day after the winter solstice - welcoming spring. The Chinese also use take a moment to tend the graves of departed loved ones during the festival.
The Ancient Town was crowded with Chinese families sipping lemon and sugar tea, wearing flower wreaths, buying spicy street food and haggling with vendors.
Our first activity of the day was lunch. The boys first proper Chinese lunch of this visit - and they weren't disappointed! Chicken, sichuan numbing peppers, rice, jasmine tea, pork, lotus - all went down with chopsticks - which we only dropped about a thousand times.
And because there were so many other things to taste - we ate a bit more!
Our first stop was to Ancient Town where we welcomed the first day of the Quingming Festival - or the Tomb Sweeping Festival. The Quingming Festival begins on the 104th day after the winter solstice - welcoming spring. The Chinese also use take a moment to tend the graves of departed loved ones during the festival.
The Ancient Town was crowded with Chinese families sipping lemon and sugar tea, wearing flower wreaths, buying spicy street food and haggling with vendors.
Our first activity of the day was lunch. The boys first proper Chinese lunch of this visit - and they weren't disappointed! Chicken, sichuan numbing peppers, rice, jasmine tea, pork, lotus - all went down with chopsticks - which we only dropped about a thousand times.
And because there were so many other things to taste - we ate a bit more!
Although Connor passed on the fried cockroaches, slugs, maggots, worms, crickets and scorpions.
For dessert we feasted on sugar cane lolly-pops hand spun and molded into Chinese animals.
Without a doubt the most interesting, unique and strange thing we did was have our ears cleaned by a Chinese street lady. We were approached by a woman wearing a head lamp and clanging two metal tongs together. She mimicked cleaning out our ears and well, we were curious. So in she went with her head light shinning down our ears. She used all sorts of tools to clean out the gunk lodged in our ears. It tickled and it felt really funny but it was really nice - and Alex couldn't say he didn't hear us to tell him to brush his teeth anymore!
Connor wasn't so keen on having a total stranger (who only had one eye - though we did count her head lamp as her second eye) dig around in his ears. He opted for a massage.
We then made our mark by tagging a wooden leaf with our Clan Flett motto - Life is Good. We hung up the leaf with hundreds of other wooden ornaments. It's lovely to know that a piece of us will always be in the beautiful city of Chengdu.
The rest of the day was spent taking in the sounds and smells of The Ancient Town. A perfect day - 10 out of 10 as Connor would say.
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