Panda Inn Chengdu

... la barbe intense! Pis je me parfume au patchoulli
pis je brule de l'encens! Oui papa je vais aller en apparte avant. Les
huits immortels font partis du pantheon Taoiste, qui est une religion
indigene a la Chine (Le bouddhisme fut importer de l'Inde, et le
confucianisme n'est pas une religion.) Le taoisme est plus mystique
aussi, et mise beaucoup sur des phrases circulaires qui ressemblent
plus a des petits proverbes qu'on trouve dans les ...

... and slavery) since I've heard so much of the Tibetan side of the argument in Dharamsala and from news / movies promoting the Tibetan cause (high-minded, spiritual, peace-loving people brutally oppressed and beaten to the point of genocide). This travel situation doesn't make me think highly of China. I don't need to pay a few thousand dollars to have a few days in Tibet. There is so much else to see including real Tibetan culture in China and it costs at ...

... people turning to watch us go by on the street did not prepare me for the arrival at the school. We had to go through a gate in order to get into the campus, and by the time we reached the main class building all the classrooms were empty and the students were lining the balconies. One of our guides said that it was probably the first time most of the students had seen a foreigner, let alone a group of 30 of them. Still, it was a pretty crazy experience.

They ...

Ken je het verhaal van Kevin en Nienke die naar de panda's gaan? Ze gingen niet. Vanmorgen ging de wekker vrooooeeeeeeggg! Te vroooooeeeeeggggg. Gekkenhuis, we zijn op vakantie en de reis is niet gisteren begonnen! We besloten toch nog maar te blijven slapen. Aan dit gedrag kun je onze "reismoeheid" een beetje aflezen. We zouden naar 2 verschillende "panda-plekken" gaan, maar vanmorgen om 6 uur besloten we het bij 1 te houden (die ene die voor morgen in de planning staat ...

We arrived in Chengdu after a very long overnight train journey from Xi'an taking 18 hours in hard sleeper class, it was something very special! Although we did meet a really cool Canadian guy called Matt who we spent the evening chatting and drinking beer; luckily he managed to find us a stash of beer to see us through the journey after a mission trekking through people sleeping on floors and thick smoke from one end of the train to the other. We managed to annoy most ...

... a little kitty. I didn't like him much at first but now I only dislike him 10% of the time. He is really a cutie and currently is such an attention *****. As soon as you walk in the door "meow." He does that constantly now. The funny thing is he is getting tons of attention from us though. He was just walking around when I took these pictures but then he started digging through the garbage so he got put in time out (Tristan's room). I wish I could have found the ...

... we be walking back down to where we started, and she said yes. We really weren't looking forward to this but we would do whatever she had planned. We finally got to the top and she realized that we didn't have enough time to walk back down to the beginning, so she called our driver that brought us up to the Wall and told him to come and pick us up at the top of the mountain. She told us that we just walked 7 kilometers, we felt ...

... on but I have no idea how safe it is. Oh well, I used it to brush my teeth and take a shower. There is absolutely no bottled water left in stores. People are standing in long lines to buy beer, tea, juice, milk, and soda. Lucky for us, most people don't know what gatorade is. There were plenty of bottles left on the shelf. Oh god, when I came back to the apartment just now, Jerry had ruined the rest of our drinking water by filling our big water jug ...

... erreicht. Am dritten Tag ging es dann einfacher, da der Weg vom Tal zum Kloster mehr benutzt war und deshalb besser zu begehen war. Trotz der Qual am zweiten Tag war es eine tolle Erfahrung. Die Moenche in den Kloestern waren sehr nett und es war echt witzig mal drei Tage absolut ohne verbale Kommunikation auszukommen. Die Kloester waren so, wie sie gebaut wurden. Nur as Holz, keine Wasserleitungen (Kein WC, keine Dusche, etc), keine Heizung, usw. Getrunken ...

... promoting buses straight back to chengdu from the gate. eager to avoid any extraneous bus riding, and seeing that it was the same price, we agreed. after waiting for a little while, an suv pulled up and we were instructed to get in. there were two chinese tourists also waiting for the 'bus' so we didn't feel too sketched out. the truck brought us to an expressway off-ramp. we got out and waited in the middle of it for the bus to stop by and pick us up. nothing is ever simple in ...