Sep 10: Chinese Cultural Immersion Day #1

We had originally planned to spend today going to Leshan, to visit the biggest Buddha statue in the world. (It used to be the second biggest, but the Taliban took care of that. . . ) The statue is carved into a mountain, and we had planned to hike up its body. But then we met Mr. Lee. With such pronouncements as "It's too touristy," and "You visit the Buddha, and he doesn't even say thankyou" he worked on us to take a Sichuan cooking class the next day instead. We would sit in on a Chinese culinary school, and Mr. Lee would translate for us. We hesitated--it was something we really wanted to do, but would mean some fairly serious reworking of our plans. Ultimately, we just decided to have Chinese culutral immersion day-- besides the class, staying in Chengdu would give us the chance to both get up early and do tai chi in the park as well as meet up for awhile with one of the Melton Foundation travel groups including a Chinese student who had grown up Chengdu.

Chinese Cultural Immersion Day! We said it over and over to ourselves. We're so excited for Chinese Cultural Immersian Day!

And as the universe is wont to do, China took notice and threw what it could at us.

It began sooner than we expected -- at dinner that night with the MF group. Jason and Dora are both Chinese, and so navigated us easily to a traditional Chengdu hot pot restaurant. Seven of us sat around a double-bowled vat with bubbling chicken stock on one side and spicy stock on the other, while fondue-dipping, well, everything. Mushrooms, cabbage, lotus root, surimi, squid, meatballs, eel, ox tripe, and, um, duck tongue. The food didn't stay on skewers, it was dumped in, and then fished out with chopsticks, which was fine, or ladeled out in great scoops of flip-floppy eel, dirty-dishwater-grey tripe, and pointy tongues--which wasn't.