Giant Pandas, a Giant Buddha, and a Giant Fight

We arrived in Chengdu, Sichuan at one o’clock in the morning.  Needless to say we were both really tired.  When you are tired, you tend to be less patient and you get annoyed easily.  That’s not a good state to be in, especially in a single file taxi queue that’s about 2 push carts wide.  In this part of the world where some people have the tendency to budge in line, the wide open space is an invitation to do so.  Sure enough, in less than 3 minutes time, everyone seemed to want to budge by walking through the wide open space.  People in the line with us saw but no one said anything.  I was half asleep when I heard a familiar voice saying ‘you have to line up’ in Mandarin.  I turned around and realized Eug was telling 2 local Chinese men who tried to sneak by us to line up.  I was surprised because Eug would usually just shake his head and give a ‘you are stupid’ kind of look, this was one of the rare times that he actually told off someone directly.  One guy replied ‘what? I was just looking’ and walked to the back of the line with his partner in crime.  Immediately after, a Chinese mom pushed a cart full of luggage right up behind Eug.  By this time, Eug was already standing next to me in attempt to block the wide open space to stop the upcoming budgers so she couldn’t get through.  She yelled out loud that she needed to park the cart at the front.  Eug told her to line up like everyone else.  She got mad and shouted ‘let me through!‘.  Eug firmly replied ‘I won’t let you through’ and held his stance.  Then this woman got furious and actually tried to push the cart right against him!  That made me TWC (Taiwan Crazy) and I told her to back off.  He must have been the hero of those who were silently watching and waiting in line because they started to show support too by telling the woman to go to the back of the line.  Good job Eug!  Luckily before a riot was about to start, we got into our taxi.  We sat in the taxi in silence for about 3 minutes before we both started cracking up.  It’s funny now but at the time we got pretty worked up.  In hindsight, it’s just another TIC (This Is China) situation, as our expat friends in China would say.

Early next morning we went to see the cutest animals in the world – Giant Pandas!  They are so adorable.  There are about 50 giant and red pandas at Chengdu’s Giant Panda Breeding Research Base.  We left at 7 am to the research zoo because pandas are usually the most active in the morning around their feeding time.  Once the feeding is over, they don’t do much besides sleep.  Even though we only had a few hours of sleep, it was all worth it.  Pandas are cute because they are very chill and very clumsy at the same time.  We noticed that everyone looking at the pandas has a benevolent smile on their face.  I am not sure if there’s any other animal that has that same effect as these adorable bears.  The funniest was seeing a giant panda lying lazily against a log with its arms and legs all stretched out.  Then he grabbed one of his feet and started chewing on it.  Another winning moment was when this other panda was resting on a tree and decided to get down.  You’d think it was his first time trying to climb off a tree.  He was so slow and awkward that we really thought he was going to pk any moment.  How can you not love them?  I really wanted to jump over the fence to give them a big bear hug.  Even Eug said he wanted a pet panda!  The only part where we were asked to show our tickets was at the nursery room where the newborn pandas were.  They were so petite (like fist size) that you could hardly imagine one day they’d be eating 100lbs of bamboo daily when they reached adult size.  They had pictures of when the babies were first born, to be honest I didn’t think they were that cute then.  They looked like hairless rats.  At the end they showed a somewhat cheesy video of how this centre helps the new panda moms to breed and take care of the naturally premature panda babies when they don’t seem to know how to care for their new broods.  It was just by coincidence that we were listening to an episode of HowStuffWorks.com podcast talking about if zoos are good or bad for the animals.  I think in this case, it is a good thing because pandas are dying out on their own in the wild.  The Chinese zoos have a reputation of being horrific in their treatment of animals but thankfully this one seems to be different.

The next day we took our time to visit the tallest Buddha in the world.  The Grand Buddha in Leshan is 71m high carved into a cliff by the water.  Its big toes are 8.5m long and fingernails taller than the average human.  In other words, it is really big.  The construction of the Grand Buddha was initiated by this monk named Haitong in hopes to stop the lethal currents of the water from taking innocent fishermen’s lives.  It worked.  Some believe that it was the blessing of the Buddha that calmed the waters, and some believe that during the 90 year construction, the rock and silt from carving the Buddha filled up the water and unintentionally controlled the currents.  Besides the Giant Buddha statue, there were gardens, caves, and temples in Leshan as well.  We got lost walking around the trail and a Buddhist monk appeared out of nowhere and offered us directions.  That was pretty neat because it was my first encounter with a monk.  Like the ones you see in olden day Chinese Kung Fu movies.

We also tried a few original Sichuan dishes: Mapo tofu, Dan Dan noodles, Twice-cooked pork, and Fish flavoured eggplant.  They were rather on the extreme spicy side for my taste buds but they were delicious.  The spice they use here is something I’ve never tasted before.  It’s a kind of spicy that doesn’t hit you until 10 minutes after you’ve already swallowed the food.  It’s silent but deadly, and a full body experience.  However, there are far more layers to Sichuanese flavours than just spicy, and we’ve really enjoyed the food here.

Sichuan is the last province we are visiting in China in this trip, and we’re off to a very fine start.  There are tons more sights to see and food to taste, I can hardly wait.