Like this:

So I said “tomorrow” and what I clearly meant was “next week”. Read between the lines. Consequently this is going to be a pretty long entry which I’ve decided to divide up in to 2 entries. Also, I’ve been trying to get Andrew to update, but I only have the capacity for so much nagging. Hopefully that sentence makes him feel guilty enough to do one soon… don’t hold your breath though.

However, on with Chengdu. We woke up early-ish to get to the panda reserve because you need to get there in the morning to see the cubs playing. Going so early also meant that there was hardly anyone else there, and there were signs all over the park telling you to be quiet, which was nice considering no one in China is ever quiet.

The first thing I did was head straight to the nursery to find out when I could hold/hug the panda. They said around 10:30 so we had a couple hours to kill in the park first. We managed to skirt the tour groups a bit as we made our way through for some quiet time just watching the pandas. We probably saw about 20 giant pandas and 15 or so red pandas throughout the day. There was one that I got a video of because it was hysterical. He was in the “adolescent” panda habitat, so he had just started eating bamboo, and he didn’t just have a small nom, he COVERED himself in bamboo and was rolling back and forth eating his little face off and looked like he was having the best time ever. I even got Andrew off camera saying, “I wish that was my life.” There was only one other couple watching this little spectacle so that probably made it even better.

We were alone watching a different panda chow down on some bamboo in a different habitat and I said, “Man it’s too bad you guys are going extinct.” I swear to you that panda stopped, stared at me, looked over at his friend, looked back at me and just sat there for a good 20 seconds. It was almost like he understood me and was going, “wait… what? We, we’re WHAT? Hey Joe! Guess what I just heard!” It was so funny.

After a while of watching panda cubs wrestle, and older pandas enjoy their bamboo just a little too much, I went back to the nursery and paid for the most expensive hug I’ll ever get.

They wouldn’t let Andrew even come in to take pictures unless he paid as well, but the woman who worked at the nursery clearly takes tons of pictures every day. She snapped about 20 of me in the 3 minutes I was chillin’ with the bear.

In order to hang out with a panda you apparently have to dress up like you’re going to perform surgery on the panda. They had gowns, masks, and shoe covers for me and the 4 other people who would hug the panda that day.

I was a little teensy bit nervous when I sat down next to him. He was only a year old but that thing was big and they have claws. However, they’re also super gentle and he was way more interested in his apple than in me. That is, until I scratched behind his ear and he looked at me like, “Who ARE you?” It’s a fairly priceless panda expression; he actually looks really surprised in the photo. It was so surreal being next to a panda; knowing how few of them are left. It’s hard to even explain. I got tons of pictures though, and based on how much I paid for said pictures, please believe you will be seeing them frequently.

We left the panda reserve shortly after that, and headed out to find some Sichuan hot pot.

Now, you can get hot pot in Shanghai. They’re all over the place. The special thing about Sichuan hot pot is that it originated there and it is crazy spicy. I mean it’s absolutely unreal how much spice these people can stomach. We ordered a medium and we should have gotten mild. That medium was hotter than anything I’ve ever eaten in the states… and I order 5 star spice Thai food. The way hot pot works is that you get a big pot full of boiling stock and spices and you order various raw things to put in them from vegetables, mushrooms, and tofu to steak, whole fish, and noodles. A medium spice hot pot in Shanghai is fine. It has a few peppers in it but nothing too bad. In Chengdu, the stock itself was spicy and they dumped tons and tons of chili peppers in there.  We took a taste and couldn’t eat it so we scooped most of the peppers out and it was still bordering on unreasonable pain. We paid for it, so we powered through, with the aid of many beers and some warm vanilla rice (Word just tried to correct that to “vanilla ice”… thanks Microsoft) milk. I doused every bowl of my spicy veggies and noodles with sesame oil and vinegar. I probably ate enough oil to clog my arteries for a year but it was that or get an ulcer. After much nose-blowing and beer-drinking we finally finished and I have never felt that uncomfortable after a meal. It was beyond heart burn, that spice felt like it was going to make my entire stomach dissolve. Sufficed to say I will probably never ever ever ever be eating a Sichuan hot pot again unless we order it as mild as possible… even that’s iffy given the tolerance of the Sichuan people.

We headed back to the hotel for the rest of the day to nap and pack and get ready for what I hope is the longest train ride I’ll ever take in my life.

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