Advice for Travelers to Chengdu

The pandas are totally worth it -- and definitely go, as all the guide books say, in the morning when the pandas are active.

While the Buddhist Wenshu temple is a famous draw, our overwhelming favorite was the Wenhua temple on the East of the city. We went right at dusk, it was cool and not crowded.

There aren't a lot of mid-range hotels in Chengdu. Just get thee a really nice one if you're so inclined. We stayed at the
Spring Business Hotel
No 80 Wen Miao Hou Jie
Chengdu
Sichuan
02886151666
for about $20 a night. Rooms were small, but very clean. And it was perfectly located right by Renming Park.

We got our hotel room through Jimmy who can organize everything -- tours, rides to and from the hotel (though these are three times the price of an easily-hailed taxi), and just getting you a place to stay in a city where getting a hotel room can be tough.
Jimmy is at 028 86062613 or jimmytour75@yahoo.com

Mr. Tray Lee -- whose business card boasts "A man who understands you in China" -- can offer a variety of very specialized tours on all aspects of the local culture from visiting a local kindergarden, to tea shops, to hospitals, to sichuan cooking school. His cell phone is 013908035353 or lee@rt98.com

Advice We Should Have Had

So, the MF travel group had a universal traveller's picture book that they carried with them. Page after page of pictures of foods and hospitals and stamps and hotel room information, all in cartoon drawings so that you just have to point to something to communicate.

WHY ON EARTH DID I NOT KNOW ABOUT THIS?

This is the best traveler's tool ever, and Eleni and are extremely bitter no one ever told us about it.

Sep 10: Cultural Immersion Day #8

That evening we went to the Wenhua Daoist temple -- by far our favorite temple so far. Not least of which because the monks all look like something out of a kids' picture book with top knots and chopsticks in their hair.

This was the first place where someone asked to take their picture with us, though we'd been told that Chinese often ask for photos with foreigners. But there was a twist. These three were doing a bit of a photo shoot, dressed in traditional gis and performing martial arts.

They had me pose with them in staged fighting stances -- and gave me tips as they did so. "Relax your shoulders" "move from your belly." (I am realizing as I write this, that this was the first effortless communication I have had here. They spoke Chinese, I spoke English, but hand motions made understanding effortless, to the point where I didn't notice we were speaking different languages. I suspect their studies of bodies and movement made silent communication a more self-evident form of interaction than it has been with others.)

After the static photos, they had me do a few, simple attacks, just pushing their shoulders or chests. If you have never sparred with a martial arts expert, it's a fairly spectacular experience. In my aikido days I had the chance a few times, but it's been quite awhile. You push one way, and then, whoosh! you're over there instead. It's a truly gentle experience, actually, but as determined and definite as being carried along in a river. They laughed and laughed at the surprised look on my face every time he placed me a foot to the side of where I'd thought I was going.

Sep 10: Cultural Immersion Day #7

Walking along the street, we saw a guy making noodles at his sidewalk restaurant. He took a cylinder dough one foot long and two inches across, and pulled it until it was doubled in length. He folded it in half, but didn't let the two halves touch. He then pulled it long again, folded it -- now there were four strands, perhaps a magic marker thick each. He repeated the process two more times, and voila, he had 16 perfectly-uniform noodles. The whole process took ten seconds. It was mesmerizing.

Sep 10: Cultural Immersion Day #6

From the temple we took a cab to a pedestrian shopping street, but got disoriented when we exited the taxi and started walking the wrong way. Seeing that we were lost, a woman on the street started talking to us in Chinese, and we pointed on our map hoping she'd show us where we were going.

Clearly not understanding what we wanted, and unable to make us understand her, she raised a finger to gesture that we should wait a moment, and then grabbed a pen from an enormous bag of clothes she had with her -- the first clue that this clean, orderly woman perhaps lived on the street -- and pulled out a pen. She then began to write Chinese characters on her hand in an effort to communicate with us that way.

Figuring this was useless, Eleni and I tried to start walking again, but she packed up her bag, and began walking with us, we assumed in an attempt to show us where we wanted to go, as others had done for us before. Though we tried to tell her she didn't have to, she insisted.

We followed her for two blocks, increasingly confused, until she stopped again, and began rifling through her bag. She pulled out three or four sheafs of paper, all covered in cramped Chinese handwriting. She picked one and then began writing on it, copying over something that was written in a book she had. Carefully, slowly, she was writing, but she was clearly doing this for us, so we couldn't bring ourselves to leave her. Then she handed the whole shebang to us -- a 20-page treatise, and a cover letter.

As she spoke, I made out the word Beijing, and suddenly realized she wanted us to get this to an address in Beijing. "Beijing?" I asked. She nodded vigorously and started thrusting crumpled bills at us.

We refused the money but took the paper, and walked away trying to figure out what on earth the pages were, not to mention why she needed foreigners to deliver it for her. A manuscript? A manifesto? Secret documents from her life as a spy? We have decided not to ask anyone at a hotel to help us read it, but are going to bring it with us to Hangzhou to ask one of the Melton Fellows to read it for us. Then I will get it to Beijing after that.

Part of me kinda keeps looking over my shoulder though . . . I mean, I've seen Gotcha and I watch Alias. I'm no dummy. Who knows what I could be carrying.

Sep 10: Cultural Immersion Day #5

After the class, we visited the Wenshu temple, a Buddhist monastery in the north part of town. They boast a vegetarian restaurant -- though it took us awhile to be sure, since they still list all the dishes as if they have meat in them. The "pork" just comes made out of soy beans.

While there, we were joined by an octagenarian in military uniform, with two teeth. He had spent two years in California during World War II, and so had a smattering of English that he wished to show off. He made lots of gun motions with boom boom noises to make sure we knew he had been in the army and insisted that we should find ourselves husbands in China. He listed the world's famous universities: Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, and the University of Michigan.

Finally, upon leaving, he paused, opened his mouth wide and pointed into it: "No teeth!" We assured him we had already noticed.

Sep 10: Cultural Immersion #4

Then we went off to Sichuan cooking class. So fun. First, we watched the beginning students. It was out of the karate kid. . . instead of wax on, wax off, they have to spend 3 hours every morning for 20 days shaking dirt around in a wok, to get the exact right wrist motion. Then they graduate to slicing daikon radish for 20 days. After Eleni and I attempted to copy them--to no one's surprise we were lousy at both -- we then went up to the intermediate class. We made fiery tofu with carp (including the heads, but who's noticing?), spicy prawns that were live before the chef twisted their little heads off, sweet and sour pork, and deep fried mushroom dumplings. It was truly fantastic, and semi-vegetarian Eleni ate not only the recently killed shrimp-- shells and all -- but a bite of the pork when the students in the class wouldn't let her get away with a simple "I don't eat meat."

Sep 10: Cultural Immersion #2 and #3

2) The next morning, we got up at 6:30 and walked to a nearby park where groups of --usually older--people practice tai chi, and other forms of exercise every morning. Dressed in yoga pants, we jumped in behind a group, and tried to follow along. This would have been far more mortifying had there not been a young Chinese woman who was doing the same thing, and was equally at sea. As it was, we did fairly well, no one paid too much attention to us, and my quads are still feeling the burn.

3) There was a major todo outside of our hotel when we came back from tai chi. Policemen and construction workers and yelling. The way a small strike might look. Mr. Lee was waiting for us in the lobby and he explained the government construction workers were there to remove a tree from the courtyard behind our hotel, but the people who lived in the apartment didn't want them to. An old woman had set up a cot, and was lying on it Arthur Dent-like to block the courtyard entrance. Soon, a TV crew arrived, and the main apartment spokesman began a speech. Mr. Lee translated: "We believe that the government is right and good, and that they won't take down this tree that we planted. If they do, however, we view it as an act of terrorism." Mr. Lee was inordinately pleased with the whole thing. "A Chinese uprising! This is democracy! It really scares the Communist party."

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.

Sep 10: Mr. Lee

After seeing the pandas yesterday, we went to sit in one of the classic Chengdu tea houses in Renming Park. Chengdu has a reputation much like an American southern city, with a sleepier pace. It is said in China that you shouldn't go to Chengdu when you're young because you'll never leave. The bamboo chairs where men gossip and women play mahjong four hours over a cup of jasmine or green tea is a classic part of that culture.

Eleni and I were just looking at an all-Chinese tea menu, about to blindly pick a cup of tea, when a man approached us and said with barely a trace of an accent: "I speak English, can I help you?" Soon, the gentleman had escorted us through the cafeteria-style line for lunch, and ordered us two cups of high quality tea. We asked him where he had studied English, and he said he had never left China -- he just perfected his English, because he loved teaching travelers about his country.

"Honestly," he said, "I like talking to travelers more than I like talking to girls. . . If you have Frommer's I'm in the book." He told us his name was Mr. Tray Lee, and I gave a yelp, 'cause he was in my book too-- just as a local fixture, who provides very personalized guide services for any travelers who come through Chengdu. I showed him his name in my book, and he continued to talk. "Yes, I definitely like talking to travelers better than girls. For example, last night, my girlfriend wanted to come over, but I wanted to watch a documentary on bats." Mr. Lee went on to tell the story of his slighted woman-friend, and as I listened to the cadence of his voice, and the precision of his English speech, I realized that he reminded me of someone with Asberger's syndrome. If my ten-cent diagnosis is correct, he's one of the more functional and sociably adapted I've seen, but his unbelivable level of knowledge about so many things -- all from a distance, all book-learning not personal experience -- as well as the meticulousness of his thought processes and handwriting, and even just the way he repeated jokes and conversational themes as if stuck in an eddy, all struck me as reminiscent of the syndrome. We spent tea with him yesterday, and this morning with him at a Sichuan cooking class, and I was just struck by his many contradictions. He is a man who loves democracy and hates Westernization. Loves travelers and claims to want to travel, but doesn't leave his city because he doesn't like the food elsewhere. He loves U.S. disaster movies, but consequently doesn't want to live in the U.S. since it's apparently so given to natural disasters.

A collection of Mr. Leeisms:

"I would love to go to Lichtenstein. I want to go to a country where I could walk across the whole thing and then say: 'Was that all there is?'"

"I try to teach my countrymen to speak English, but they are too shy about it. They can be in the mafia and kill people, but they are afraid to speak English."

"Mafia? Oh yes, it's everywhere. But the biggest mafia is the Communist party."

"Chefs never get divorced -- it's not worth it for their wives to divorce them, because they get fed so well."

"Mostly I wanted you to take this cooking course, so I could come and look at that girl in the front row -- I am still a bachelor, I need a wife who's a good cook."

"Buddhism pays attention to the future, Taoism pays attention to the present, so I have Leeism which combines both."

"I would love for more Americans to take Sichuan cooking classes. I would like Laura to tell George Bush to take classes so he could cook Sichuan food for her."

"This watch never works. It was made in Russia. I have another one that was made in Japan, but I like to wear this one, so I can say to the government: 'Look what Communism is good for!'"

"Lichtenstein. I'm going to open a Sichuan restaurant in Lichtenstein."