16.5 hours of the train ride from Xi'an-
We had heard it was going to be a lot colder in Chengdu, but that was not the case! We were surprised at the nice fall weather!
Our hostel was called "The Loft". The building was an old paper factory, gutted, and turned into a really interesting hostel! Again, the cheapest one in the city, so we ran into a few people we knew from other cities.
When we arrived we took our normal walk around the block to scope out the city. We came across a big park that was having a flower exhibition, we entered the park and saw lots of flowers and many people dancing to very loud music. The Chinese are also big fans of Karaoke....although most are absolutely horrible and it hurts your ears to be around. There was a small lake, so we rented a small boat and paddled around, and we had a few collisions with other boats!
The night time was spent at the hostel's Halloween party! They really went all out with free food, their famous local dish called Hotpot. They put many different things on skewers ie..vegetables, meat, fish, eggs....and unidentified foods. Then you place them in a big boiling bowl of spicy oil. They also gave each person two free beers!!! There was a costume party and we did the best we could to come up with outfits from our bags. I was Pippy Long Stocking, and Agustin was a surfer monster.
Our second day in Chengdu was spent searching for these "discount tickets" to the Panda research center, only to find out that the deal ended on the 31st of October! We ended up seeing a lot of the city anyway.
We also visited the Tibetan quarter, saw many monks and Tibetan crafts.
On the third day we did what everyone comes to Chengdu to do, see the Pandas! Chengdu has a HUGE research center for pandas. The reserve was really cool and the Chinese have done a nice job with this center. We were entertained watching the pandas play, eat, climb trees, and just chill. Agustin fell in love with Pandas, and took about 90 photos! There were 3 baby pandas, we weren't allowed to take pictures, but we secretly took some video....hopefully we can post videos at some point!
We saw many pandas, including the rare red panda(looks like a raccoon with red fur), and even got to try some panda food! It was definitely worth coming to Chengdu to see the pandas!
We had no plans on where to go after Chengdu, but after lots of discussing and research we decided to go to Chongqing, so we said bye to Michelle and Rob and boarded our bus. Our plan is to find a boat to sail down the Yangzi River and see the Three Gorges Dam!! We are kind of done with the cities.... They are looking the same, with many KFC's, Starbucks, MacDonalds, huge buildings, and many many people!!
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