Chengdu: Seeing pandas and eating yak!

Arriving in Chengdu I`d greed to meet up with Fiona and Joanne (UK) whom I ran into in Xi`an. We spent the morning visiting the pandas just north of town--and boy were they cute! The park itself was not really spectacular, but the pandas were great fun to watch for a few hours. They had both great pandas and smaller red pandas, all eating bamboo and laying about dozing..

After lunch I located Jane at the Tianmen square, with the Chairman Mao statue, a famed landmark of Chengdu. We then moved on to the Wushan temple--which I had planned to skip (yet another Ming-style temple, you know)--but which turend out to be one of the best temples I`ve been to so far! Not really for the temple though, although it was only Y5 to enter and you can collect a bunch of insence sticks for free at the entrance if you wish to worship Buddha (he charges 3 sticks for a whish, apparently, but you have to come back and give thanks if it comes true), and there`s an amazing piond filled with turtles that will supposedly support the wishes of their donators as long as they live... The real treat is the teahouse inside the temple grounds, where local people come for the weekend to read, chat, play cards, and (obviously), have tea. We stayed there until they closed, moving on to Chengdu`s Tibetan streets for sightseeing and food. Entering a local eatery, there was a distinct smell of starch sheep in the room. As the food Jane ordered came to the table, the strong scent of sheep turned out to be the smell of yak--one of the main sources of food for the Tibetan people. We had some fantastic youghurt, yak meat with chili, dumplings with mashed potatoes inside (made with yak fat or milk, from the taste of it). Also, we tried some local Tibetan wine made from a special kind of wheat that only gows in the highlands. The food was delicious, so I chose to ignore the sprawling cockroaches I only noticed as we left the place...

I was originally planning on leaving Chendu tomorrow, to see the giant Buddha in Leshan and then climb Emei`shan (a holy Buddhist mountain this time)--which I still will, but Jane has invited me to stay in her home, so I`ll take the opportunity to explore Chinese everyday life here an additional day :)