September 12 (Saturday) – Chengdu

Today was Panda Day. The Chengdu Panda Breeding Center was only about a half hour from our hotel. The center is on park-like grounds but it wasn’t at all rural as one would expect. The weather was cool and a bit misty (grey skies again), which is ideal panda watching weather. Many were out feeding (it was breakfast time) with about three or four in each enclosure, grouped by age. We also saw two babies (born July 19^th). They were in baby incubators in the panda nursery (no pictures allowed)…pretty helpless.



















For a donation of $150 you can hold a one year old panda for one minute…an opportunity of a lifetime that we took. We gowned up in booties, smocks and gloves. They sat the panda on my lap and gave him (her?) a piece of dried apple to keep him distracted. He was heavy and had pretty wiry hair…they are very fluffy but aren’t as soft as they look. He was totally indifferent to what was going on. When Paul sat down beside me the panda actually put his arm around Paul (absolutely the truth). This will likely be one of the best highlights of the trip. 
  





Video in new window of Pandas at Play







Later we saw red pandas (look sort of like a fox but with a panda head)...really cute. 















Next stop was the Sanxingdui Museum. The drive there was quite an adventure, John (the driver) had to drive in the left lane a lot because the road conditions were pretty bad…pot holes that could eat a small car and long stretches where whatever smooth surface there might have once been was long gone and the road seemed to be constructed of bumpy rocks. We actually got to see a bit of rural China and smaller communities this way. Many of the buildings were in fairly poor repair and/or looked like they were abandoned but I’m not sure they were. We saw lots of bikes and scooters and one man carrying two large baskets suspended on the ends of a long pole carried across his shoulders…a scene out of an old National Geographic magazine.


The museum was focused on an early (4000 years ago) Bronze Age civilization in the area. The area’s first discoveries were made in 1929 but most of the major discoveries were from the 1960’s through the 80’s. The museum contained a lot of pottery, jade and bronze artifacts. They had sacrificial pits for most of the items and the pits had many similar items. It was interesting but there was a lot of similarity/repetition. This mask had big eyes to see far, and big ears to hear from a distance. It is not a representation of an alien :-).









Before dinner we walked through Jinli Street…full of interesting shops, old (looking) architecture and interesting looking local street food (plus a Dairy Queen, a TCBY and a Starbucks). One Chinese gentleman wanted to get his picture taken with us. A Chinese woman had her eight year old daughter talk to us to practice her English. Of the hundreds of people strolling the street we were the only Caucasians…guess we were a novelty to them.

We then went to the Shue Feng Ya Yun Tea House for a variety show. The show included music, a puppet (manipulated with hands and sticks) that did some simple magic, and hand shadow puppets (owl, birds, rabbits and many others…really intricate). There was a quick change demonstration where the actors almost instantly changed the colors of their masks and their robes. The mask changes you could sort of figure out (pulling a string with the mask being pulled up into the large headdress). The full color changes to the full flowing robes must have been done by real magic because there was absolutely nothing to give a clue as to how they did it.

















Chengdu Album