Xinhua Hotel Chengdu

Visit to Lei Lei's University – Wenjiang Southwest School of Economics and Finance

Met up with Lei Lei for a dinner at her uni the other night ，had a brief tour around her campus and got to site through one of her lectures where she gave a talk on Japanese culture ( was really cute!).

Thing I’ve realized about China is that everything is just enormous here. Her campus is spread out over several kilometers and all the ...

... fast: 18 lbs in just one month.

You can read articles on this website to learn more about this amazing program.

I have read all the articles in this site, and from my experience, I cannot agree them more. You can not lose weight fast by eating low fat food, low calorie food or low carb food. I tried all of them and they ...

... than actually climbing a mountain, which made a lot of sense when we finally got to the main object of interest, the giant Buddha. He is carved into a cliff face that overlooks the convergence of the rivers below to oversee the safety of the boats passing by below. On the side of his head we approached from there was a fairly large plaza, mostly taken up by amusement park style queuing gates.

What we couldn’t see from that point was just how long the line actually was ...

Okay, definitely woke up too late today. Oops. At least I wasn't the last person to get to class. We went over the rest of vocabulary for the chapter. At the break after two hours You laoshi told us we were going to have our test now, but most of the class told him that they didn’t think they’d had enough time to study, so he decided to put it off until tomorrow. We spent the last hour and a half of class studying independently, which was nice because I was able to go back ...

... how bad it was. Such a let down. When we were done we wandered back to the hostel and fell asleep. So tired. The next day in Chengdu would be our last, sadly. We wandered back to the People's Park since there was a train ticket office there - and even though the train to our next destination would be 19 hours, we really had no other option. We weighed our options: stay in Chengdu one more night and take the 4:00 train to Kunming tomorrow, take a ...

... dance floor where everyone was dressed as hip hop stars. The DJing if you can call it that was something else, blur mixed with R Kelly. It wasn't quite Pasha anyway. The following day we went to the Sichuan Opera which was a bit like a variety performance of different acts including acrobatics, hand puppetry, the Mandolin and Chinese panto. The highlight being the Changing Faces part which is famous in this region, where actors appear to instantly change their face with ...

Our wonderful overnight ride on a soft-sleeper train ended as the train pulled into Chengdu station at 8:10am, 3 hours late but perfect time to arrive in the city. We hauled our luggage up and down the walkway (no elevator or escalator) out of the station and there several dozens of taxi cabs waiting. We got into the first cab in line and in 20 minutes we arrived at my father's Chengdu home in Wan Ke City Garden Condominium ...

... the Sichuan Art gallery, whereas Jon had a massage and a swim at the bathhouse. Meeting up later, we decided it was time we had to try out the famous Sichuan hotpot, Now we had we warned that it was very spicy, so when the waitress suggested having one part of the hotpot without spice, we thought it was a good idea. We chose various meats and vegetables to put in the hotpot and after they were cooked, then they would be dunked in a bowl of peanut oil, garlic ...

... of Sichuan, which is known for its spicy food. Hot pot is a very literal name. It's a big bowl with spicy broth that you cook meat, tofu, vegetables, mushroom, ect in. It was originally made by poor farmers who ate scrap meats and left over food and to make the food edible, they would make it as spicy as possible. I love hot pot, but it's really a love it or hate it meal. The next day we did the one event that is meant to be done in Sichuan, if not China- see pandas. We went to ...

... to those that were interested, I was having to yell so much to be heard over those that weren't. By the end of the day, my throat was so raw I could barely speak. And just to make the whole thing complete, my belt chose this day to break and my trousers were in danger of falling down throughout the whole nightmarish experience. So my advice for someone contemplating teaching in China, but unsure as to whether or not they are suited to the job? Don't.