November 1-4

It turns out that each month, I get two extra days off in addition to my Sunday holiday, because the Senior 3 students have monthly exams, and since there are several thousand of them, all the classrooms are used. So in that time, I made a trip to Chengdu to wander round on my own, see how I got on with the language!
The bus trip was easy and uneventful. I learned the characters for “Chengdu” and “Santai” (the city I live in) so I could read the bus destinations, and off I went. Strolled round Jinli street, a reconstructed section of road near Wuhou Temple and the Tibetan area of town. It has been rebuilt in the old fashion of Chinese buildings-lots of dark carved wood and latticing, and full of shops selling all manner of traditional crafts and foods. Some examples of the traditional crafts are shadow puppets, scroll paintings on bamboo, folk toys, carved lucky gourds and masks (!! And no, I have not yet purchased one, Mom!) The kids would have loved the stall with the man blowing candy animals. He wadded up a translucent blob of stretchy candy gel, folded it into a tube, stretched a long piece and as he blew into it, pulled and pushed at various parts of the blob to create pigs and dragons, horses and birds. The whole process took no more than a few minutes.
I strolled along, camera at the ready, and let myself be carried along by the crowd. Incense wafted in the air, along with the smells of the open snack stalls selling traditional foods, very colourful and aromatic, and swarmed by hordes of Chinese tourists from various provinces in China. There were also some very westernized eateries, Starbucks and TCBY no less, looking quite out of place in among all the cared wood and lanterns. I had also forgotten that it was Halloween, and was jolted back into the western calendar by jack o’lanterns on the tables of a bar, and pumpkin lanterns hung among the bright red paper ones for good luck and prosperity. Couldn’t resist photos of those!
Beside the winding alleys of Jinli lies the Wuhuo temple enclosure. No longer used as a temple, it is now a museum with a beautiful garden and fishpond. Since Mao’s time, of course, religion of any flavour has been discouraged, and most of the school kids I talk to say they are not of any religion, though many say their parents or grandparents are Buddhist. Still, there are working temples around, just yesterday, a couple students invited me to go with them to see the Buddhist temple in Santai, which is a gem of a place set up on a hilltop, with about 100 monks. I hadn’t even realized it existed, as most of my tour guides have been concerned with showing me the shopping and eateries of the town! I’ve spent more time in restaurants in the past two weeks that in the 10 years I spent in India I think! The temple here is from the Tang dynasty, and is in the process of reconstruction, as it is admittedly a bit tatty looking. But it made me all nostalgic to hear the temple drums and gongs, and smell the incense in the chapels. I even recognized some of the deity statues, which quite impressed the two girls I was with. Lots of drawing potential, and I plan to head back up on my own sometime for a few hours. The draw also is that there is a small restaurant attached to the monastery, and it’s vegetarian, glory be! I have become used to the food here, not hard, as it’s delicious, and very spicy. Apparently Sichuan is renowned through-out China for it’s hot and spicy food. The huoguo (hotpot- like a fondue with a bubbling pot of spices and loads of plates full of various vegetables, meat, mushrooms and seaweed bits which get dumped into the pot and one fishes them out with chopsticks) that I went to last night was a pigeon soup full of all sorts of mushrooms and fungus of different types, as well as all the squishy meat bits, this time, I was told, including dog tails, which as a delicacy, were mounded on my plate…Not bad, a bit like dark chicken but very bony.
But I digress…that was last night, and I’ve yet to write about the highlight of my weekend! After I returned from Chengdu on Thursday night, I got a phone call from the office there which was in the process of arranging my residence permit, telling me that I needed to come to Chengdu! So back I went again on Friday, a 2.5 hour trip by bus each way, to go to show my face at the PSB office. That done, the office worker, Fiona, and I went to visit the panda breeding base on the outskirts of Chengdu. She had never been there, and was as eager as I to see the pandas. Cost 30 yuan to get in, which works out to about 7$, and the park was huge, cobbled paths wending though tunnel-like towering stands of bamboo to the various areas of the park: the museum and research labs, and panda movie, all of which we skipped to head straight to the nursery! There we saw a 3 month old panda, about the size of a 1 year old child fast asleep in a wooden crib, paws and stubby tail twitching in its dreams. We were of course spellbound, and uttered all the usual cooings over its cuteness, before heading outside to the play enclosure for the panda “kids”. There were about 10 of them, in a big open-air area with trees and a jungle gym of logs and bamboo. The pandas acted just like kids, playing and fighting and rolling around, climbing and falling, chasing each other around. Could have stayed there all day, and used up all my film!
Unfortunately, we didn’t have as much time as we’d have liked to stay, as we had to get back to have lunch with the rest of the agency workers, so we made just a quick trip to have a look at the red pandas, which look nothing like pandas to me, but rather more like large red cats with slightly fox-like faces and bright orange-red fur. Next time I’ve a day off, I could spend a whole day just watching pandas…!
Now I’m back in school, taught a few primary classes on Saturday, which didn’t enthrall me particularly, never having taught so many small kids before. They of course didn’t know any English at all, so the class was pretty much chaos. Ah well, have to come up with a different strategy for next week. Play games and sing songs, I guess. Or tie ‘em all down and gag them! After dinner last night, I was taken out to learn to play Mah Jong, the national pastime of the Chinese, and particularly in Sichuan. Apparently people win and lose huge amounts of money at theis, and can play non stop all night. I threw in the towel at midnight, and retreated to my room, though as a beginner, I wasn’t expected to make any wagers, fortunately. It’s a fiercely fast and competitive game, and the players get all worked up and excited about it, slamming down the pieces and shouting at each other.