Golden Week Part 1: Chengdu

      On October 1, Sarah, Lucy, Lauren and I finally set off on our Golden week adventure we had so been looking forward too! We stayed out pretty late at a club the night before, so that morning we packed in a tired kind of frenzy. Before going to the subway we put more money on our phones and grabbed some 包子 (baozi, small buns with different fillings).  We took the subway for about 45 minutes to the Maglev high speed train. It only took us 15 minutes after getting on that to get to the airport! Normally it's about another hour! The train was really cool and went over 400 km/hour.  After getting through security we had a while to wait for our plane.  We watched a chubby little boy be followed around by multiple adults, one of them, his grandmother I think, kept shoving food in his mouth. He would also randomly scream. It was extremely entertaining for he was quite the little Chinese emperor. Our flight to Chengdu was 3 hours and I slept for a good portion of it.

Me, Sarah, Lauren, and Lucy before setting off 

Great pic of Lucy and Sarah on the Maglev

     When we landed someone from our hostel met us and took us by bus to the hostel. The hostel we stayed at was called The Loft. It was much nicer than I expected. Our room was a little damp and chilly, but overall the accommodations were very nice.  One of the girls working at the hostel recommended that we have dinner at a small restaurant down the street. The food was great! We signed up to go to the Panda center in the morning and then pretty much went straight to bed.

The Loft

      We got up at 6:30 so that we could get breakfast in the hostel at 7 and be ready to leave by 7:20.  Breakfast was delicious! They had American breakfast so I had fried eggs, toast and bacon. It was really good! We took a  van to the Panda center and met our tour guide named Dora, who looked like a Chinese version of Dora the Explorer. When we saw the first panda, I almost died of joy. They are absolutely the cutest creature I have ever seen before in my entire life. I think I could have watched them all day. The walls separating us from the pandas were quite low and it was really hard to restrain myself from just jumping in and cuddling with a giant, fluffy panda. We also saw red pandas, which basically look like little red raccoon pandas. They were not quite as cute as the originals. Then we got to see the tiniest baby pandas through a window, but we were not allowed to take pictures. They were so tiny! And they were all sleeping in a little pile with one another! It was one of the cutest things I have ever seen!
      Seeing the pandas was not enough for us though, we each paid 1000RMB (about $150 USD) to actually hold, yes hold in my arms, a sweet baby panda. Actually it was not really a baby, it was much bigger than I expected, but most of it was just fur.  That experience now defines my life.  It was the most amazing thing I have ever done! The panda, named Qiqi, just sat happily on my lap while one of the workers dipped bamboo in honey and continuously fed it.  After they pried him out of my arms, I was given a certificate of panda love and a panda mouse pad! Soooo worth the 1000RMB.

Holding Qiqi!

     That afternoon we had hot pot, which originated in Sichuan, for lunch. Hot pot is when you get a huge bowl of broth that you heat up in the middle of the table. You order different meats and vegetables to put in it and let them cook and then eat them. Since we were in Sichuan, which is known for its spicy food, we had to make sure we ordered not spicy broth! We went back to the hostel and watched the new Alice and Wonderland and then took naps.  We woke up and had dinner at the hostel and then went to a Sichuan Opera. Before the opera we were served tea in a little tea room type area. The tea was excellent! The opera was okay, the costumes were really bright and colorful, but all of the music and singing was pre-recorded, so that kind of took away from the experience. After the opera, we went straight to bed.
      The next morning we got up at 5:40 for an excursion to Mt. Qingcheng and Dujiangyan irragation system. On the way there we stopped for suprise baozi! They were delicious! Our entire tour group was Chinese people and our tour guide did not speak any English. Mt. Qingcheng was really cool with lots of temples and such, but it was also quite the hike. We were all out of breath. However, there were elderly Chinese men and women walking up these precarious steps with huge packs on their backs full of potatoes and other vegetables. They made me feel like I really need to pick up my exercise game. While we were going up and down the mountain, children kept pointing at us and shouting "外国人" (foreigner). Several people wanted to take pictures with us because they had seen few or no foreigners before.  After our hike, we also had to hike back to our bus. Then we went to a lazy susan style restaurant for lunch that was not very good. We were starting to get tired, but we still had to go tour the irrigation system.
     On our way to the irrigation system, we got a little surprise. The bus randomly stopped and we got off and we taken into a windowless room in some random building.  In the room, we were basically exposed to a live infomercial on knives and water bottles. I could not exactly follow it because it was entirely in Chinese and I kept falling asleep. Thankfully, it did not last too long and we were on our way to the Duxiangyan. 
     At Duxiangyan, the first thing we did was cross a huge swinging bridge filled with hundreds of people.  Sarah was really scared and said she was not going to cross, but of course she did. I thought it was a kind of fun adventure! I figured there was only a small chance of the bridge actually breaking. On the other side of the bridge we were subjected to yet another long explanation entirely in Chinese that none of us could follow. However, as soon as that was over, all of the people in our tour group started forcing their children to take pictures with us and even getting in them themselves! There were two little chubby twin boys, we referred to them as tweedle dee and tweedle dum, who were especially cute and mischievous!  Then we took a little cart to tour the rest of the area, which was basically more pagodas and temple type things. We finally left and returned to the hostel and we slept pretty much the whole bus ride back.  We had dinner at a restaurant called 家家好吃 (jia jia haochi, basically home home delicious).  The food was pretty good, but we were really craving 
sweets afterward. We wandered the streets and finally found a place with desserts and wine. The wine was 
really bad, as is most wine in China, and the desserts were a little weird, we ordered pudding, but it was like a
weird kind of milkshake, but good. We gossiped and had fun until we were to exhausted to stay awake any 
longer and then we went back and went to bed.  

Swinging Bridge

       The next morning we slept in some and then had breakfast and checkout of the hostel. Our train did not 
leave until later in the afternoon, so we left our bags at the hostel and went and toured Wenxu Monastery.  The
monastery had some really pretty gardens and a really great tea house that we went to. We got Oolong Cha 
and sat at a cute little stone table and drank the tea and chatted. The tea was really good and the weather was 
gorgeous so it was a perfect last afternoon! We went back to the hostel and had a snack of giant baozi and 
hung out on the patio of The Loft.  

Drinking tea at Wenxu Monastery

     We left the hostel at 8:45 to catch our train, which Lucy had told us left at 
11:20. However, we got on our train, which was already full of people, at 9:15 and it left 5 minutes later. We 
were super confused so we checked our tickets and realized it was supposed to leave at 9:20!! We barely 
made it!! We laughed about that for quite sometime and about our situation on the train as well. We thought we
had booked soft sleepers and were eagerly looking forward to what we thought would be a Hogwarts Express
type compartment with beds. That was not the case. The car was just set after set of six bunk beds, three on 
each side, which no door to each section.  We talked a little to some of the Chinese people who wanted to 
know where we were from, but not too long after that the lights in the train suddenly turned out and we took 
that as our cue to go to bed!  We all slept pretty terribly, but the next morning we got to see some really pretty
scenery before reaching Xi'an, the next leg of our tour!