Kempinski Chengdu

... et a vivre nos vie. Et
pour remedier a ce probleme hier, en arrivant a Chengdu, on est aller a
l'hopital se prendre des vrais medicaments. Pas des
medicaments imaginaires a base de poudre de couille d'ours polaire, oh
non monsieur, ou bien des Red Herb mixees avec des Green Herb! Nous on
voulait des bonnes vieilles medicines occidentales, avec des effets
secondaires intenses.



Donc on arrive a l'hopital, et la ca devient TRES ...

... idea of where we wanted to go and luckily while at the bus stop a woman helped us figure out how many stops to go and which bus to take to get to the Thatched Cottage of DuFu, a famous poet. Again the landscaping was beautiful. There was a Pagoda of Buddhas. When they were excavating they found pillars underneath which they covered with clear glass so people could see them. It was also the first pagoda I’ve been to that you could go inside of. It ...

... The bathroom has a glass wall. We are pleased it has a curtain. We feel like we are in a fish bowl.

After checking in we went to lunch and we had our first Sichuan meal. It is a lot spicy compared to other regions. We walked around near the hotel get our bearings.

The weather here is rainy and cooler than Beijing. We were told that Chengdu was a lot hotter and more humid.

The streets and shops look a lot like Beijing. We were taken to a restaurant ...

... since I forgot to bring my camera to take pictures! For dinner we went to a Hot Pot dining place, where there is a boiling bowl of soup in the middle and you throw all sorts of things in. Again I tried foods I never imagined I would: chicken heart, cow lung, pig liver, shrimp dumplings, pheasant egg, cow intestine, and even pig brain! Nothing tasted bad per se, but there were some strange textures!! Now I must go back to sleep on this hard bed...

... starbucks, looking at the fishes, stuff myself with all sorts of snacks such as chicken heart and many others that I have never heard before, checking out how the silk is harvested in a backshop, etc. If it werent for my friend I would have missed out this gem. Then at night I decided to give the Sichuan opera a miss and bought some DVDs back to the hostel ...

So yesterday was my first day at the crayon english school (thats what it's called I think... all i can remember is that is has Crayon and English in its name... school seems like it would be obvious too). I had 6 little girls. I guess the one little boy I have couldn't make it. I was really nervous but it didn't go too bad. I had more trouble trying to park my new bike (we will save that story for later). The lessons were about "his" and "hers" and "How much is it?" I ...

... was doing and to take him some peaches, but the guy had left the hospital. As they were driving away from the hospital they saw the guy hobbling down the road, apparently he was doing alright. The next day the guy called Mike's phone saying he needed money for something in the hospital and Mike couldn't really understand what he was saying. He gave the phone to Xiao Li and she said, we saw you walking down the street, we came to ...

... none too pleased about the way the day was going. At the moment, many people are still out on the sidewalk, sleeping in tents and chairs. The power is back on, but people are still afraid to spend the night indoors. All of the restaurants in the area were completely out of food by 7:00pm, all of the bakeries are empty, and supermarkets have been shut down. The only place we could find that still had food was Dico's, a Taiwanese version of KFC, but people ...

... taken a tour of the kitchens like a visiting dignitary and picked out the tastiest looking things we were off. The girl in charge of our table decided we weren't competent to be left on our own so kept an eye on our hotpot as it bubbled while adding the meat and vege at required intervals. It all came good in the end and was very tasty indeed! Another thing that Sichuan is famous for is the opera, we ...

... our paths become uncrossable. tam, maggie, evan, and i, as well as this couple greg and elizabeth who we met in the hostel (they just finished teaching english in korea for a year and a half...we all picked their collective brain about their experience) went out for lunch at this wonderful vegetarian restaurant in a monastery. the food was delicious (all manner of fake meat as usual) with the only strangeness being the jug of 'grape juice' that we ordered...it tasted like ...