Chengdooin' It

One thing that Lucas and I both wanted to experience before returning to good ol’ Meiguo is a “real” Chinese city out west. This and other reasons led us to the within-China-famous city of Chengdu, located inside the within-China-famous province of Sichuan (you may actually recognize that name from the devastating earthquake that happened here in 2008).

This city has quite a reputation; I think the best way I’ve heard it described is as “a big city with a small city feel.” One thing everyone knows about Chengdu is that the people there are sooo chill. One of the many things it is famous for is its plentiful tea houses, where natives can be seen sipping wonderful flower tea all day long, playing Mazhang or a number of other Chinese games. They also can be seen in the ubiquitous hot pot restaurants, taking upwards of three hours for a single meal. In short, it seemed like Chengdu was the opposite of Shanghai, where the pace of life is perhaps the fasted in the mainland.

Our experiences here during the past week have very much served to confirm that reputation. Walking through People’s Park during our first day was especially cool; we sat for a while outside one of the teahouses, got our ears cleaned (probably won’t repeat that experience!), watched people dance, and saw a master calligrapher at work brushing giant, beautiful characters on the ground with only water.

The rest of the week was a lot of fun as well. In addition to being an interesting city in and of itself, Chengdu also serves as a springboard to all kinds of other hotspots in Sichuan. As we only had a week, we just stuck to the day-trip locations. I think my favorite spot had to be the world-famous pandas—they certainly lived up to the hype. Towards the end of the day we found a 5x5 ft pen containing eight of the babies; some were crawling around, some were wrestling, some were sleeping in awkward positions—all of them though were absolutely adorable. I think I may agree with Lucas’s claim that this was perhaps the cutest thing ever seen anywhere in the history of the universe.

Another pretty remarkable attraction we checked out was the biggest Buddha in the world at Leshan, a couple hours away from Chengdu. Carved over a thousand years ago over the course of a hundred years, this guy clocks in at some 240 ft, with each pinkie toe being about the size of Shaquille O’Neal. Ridiculous.

Overall, it was a great way to end our four-month China adventure. Our host for the week, Karla, treated us waay too well and it was super fun hanging out with the Chengdu study abroad students and getting a feel for their lifestyle. It definitely does seem to be a different world than Shanghai; not better or worse necessarily, but certainly different, and I’m very glad we had the chance to experience it.