Chengdu - Market Street

On our last morning in Chengdu we visited Market Street.  So many wonderful stalls with handmade toys and trinkets.  We walked about for a few hours enjoying the sunshine and culture.  For lunch we ate at a traditional Chinese family restaurant and were impressed with how much better we'd gotten at using chopsticks.

Here we outside our hotel - couldn't tell you the name of it - as you can see - it's written in Chinese.  Eddie's got his morning cup of Starbucks Coffee.  We couldn't help it - every morning we had breakfast at Starbucks (that was just just around the corner, naturally). Lattes and cheese and ham croissants.  

The rest of the day it was dumplings and pork.

Connor on his quest to find all food items shaped like snakes.  

Seeing as it's the Year of the Snake - and he and I are both snakes - 

he's determined to quite literally eat his way through the year.  

This treat was a lolly-pop of blown confection sugar.  

In honor of Connor's fantastic handwriting work he'd done this trip, there was an entire market stall devoted to handwriting tools guaranteed to give you fantastic handwriting.  

The boys looking very Western in their Life is Good hats.  

We purchased a painted ornament to remember Chengdu by.  

This gentleman used a tiny stick to paint the word family for us inside the glass ball.

Beautiful street decorations.

Chengdu is in the Sichuan Province - the gateway to Tibet.  

Just outside our lunch restaurant were many monks who were out enjoying the spring weather. 

The boys showing off their Kung Fu bracelets.  Did you know they are Kung Fu masters?

Chengdu - Pandas, Kites, Uno and Hot Pot

Today we visited the Panda Breeding Center - reason enough to visit Chengdu!  We saw a gang of teenage pandas that were born the same year as Alex.  They were perfect 13 year olds - eating their weight in bamboo and throwing grass at each other.  

The bamboo was simply beautiful and the sun was  shining on our perfect day.  

My new motto.

Connor feeding the coy fish - they nearly jumped into his lap to eat!

Did you know there are red pandas?  

After our trip to the Panda Centre, we headed to Wang Jiang Lou Park where we had a ridiculously fabulous afternoon.  Kite flying, geo-caching, Uno and spicy spaghetti.  

Chinese calligraphy at the entrance of the park.  

After a bit of haggling we got our kites and settled into a beautiful patch of green.

One of the coolest things about China is getting to see older Chinese people 

do their daily exercises in sync with each other.  

By far the best part of our day - a few rounds of Uno at a Mahjong table 

in a traditional Chinese Tea House.

Making our way across town to get our nails done - a regular activity in any Asian country.  

 The boys were skeptical at first - but ended up loving it so much 

we went back a second time and had our toes done!

Eddie's favourite part of the day - Hot Pot!  By now the boys had tried Sichuan numbing peppers, ginger dumplings and spicy spaghetti.  But nothing could have prepared them for Hot Pot!  The entire process was only made worse by the fact that you were meant to dip the already slimy and slippery food into a steaming pot of hotness - with chopsticks.  We pretty much spent the night fishing our food out of the hottest bowl ever and sucking the oil off the end of our sticks.  

Still - it was pretty great our our sinuses were cleared out!  

Chendgu - Leshan Giant Buddha and Sichuanese Opera

Today we headed off to visit the Leshan Giant Buddha.  The Buddha was built during the Tang Dynasty.   It is carved out of a cliff face that lies at the confluence of the Minjiang, Dadu and Qingyi rivers.  It is the largest stone Buddha in the world.  A Chinese Monk named Haitong began building it in 713AD.  He hoped that the Buddha would calm the rushing waters that threatned the shipping vessels traveling down the river.   Rumor has it that Haitong gouged out his own eyes to raise funding to keep the project going after he ran out of money.  Unfortunately Haitong died before the project was complete and it wasn't until 70 years after his death that the Buddha was completed by his disciples in 803AD.

Alex and Connor spotting our exit - it was written in English!

Getting ready to board the ferry to view the Buddha  

 

While waiting in line to get on the ferry we made friends with a young Chinese boy named Eric.  

Eric was fascinated with Alex and Connor.  

He had a great time practicing his English with them - "ok brothers let's go!"

Eric's mom and Eric weren't shy about joining in on our family photos. 

Eric also wasn't shy about using Eddie's iPad!  

Our first view of the Buddha - visitors can hike up the side of the mountain to get a closer look 

The Buddha was truly incredible!  The drainage system that was put in place hundreds of years ago is still in working order.  There are drainage pipes carved into various places on his body that carry away water when it rains so that the Buddha will weather time (and weather).  

That evening we were meant to have dinner at a popular Chinese restaurant.  And popular it was!  There were easily a couple of hundred people in a tiny little restaurant.  If you weren't crammed into a little booth with your dog, your brother and your grandmother, you were hovering over someone else's table waiting for them to finish so you could snatch a seat.  After 45 minutes in line to get our food we carried it away to eat on a bench.

Egg rolls, noodles and ginger dumplings - worth the wait!

After dinner we headed to to a theatre for a taste of Sichuan Opera.  It was a bit of a viarety show - musical instruments, acrobatics, shadow pupets, comedy sketches, dancing...  The highlight was the face changing masks.  It's said that ancient people painted their faces to drive away wild animals.  The actors change their masks more than 10 times in less than 20 seconds - they raise their hand, swing their sleeve or toss their face and a new mask falls from their head piece.

Chengdu - Ancient Town

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!

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.