Chengdu

 China Video, Chengdu: Click Here!

I'm warning you, if you're not into adorable creatures, skip this post. There's one big reason to go to Chengdu (other than spicy food) and that's Pandas. So this blog post is going to be all about them. Pandas are adorable. Seriously. If you've only seen pictures of them then you have to see them in person. They're hilarious and squishy. The kind of animal you wouldn't mind getting mauled by as long as you could get a hug in first. Clear this plane, we're ready to go!

Chengdu reminded me more of Singapore than the first 2 Chinese cities we have visited. Lots of Prada and Gucci ect. This is where the whole "Red China" thing breaks down. It's like "yeah, yeah I know you're all communists but I'm gonna have to call you out on that based on the 4 Mini-Cooper dealerships and the Louis Vuitton store we just passed....." Please!

We fell into bed, woke up early and scarfed breakfast so we could have plenty of time to visit the pandas before boarding our plane to Tibet. We stopped in the Panda kindy first. These guys were all about 1 year old and they were ADORABLE! But they were inside so the pics are all kind of dark.

We want one!

Then we saw some adult pandas. They are hysterical. The way they use their hands to eat bamboo is so like us. They really just need a Barca lounger and flat screen TV so they can watch Animal Planet while they're snackin'!

Just eating away...  Pandas only eat a special kind of bamboo that grows at higher altitudes so all the bamboo they eat has to be shipped in from higher up. And these guys eat A LOT of bamboo. So keeping everyone fed is a pretty big and expensive job.

Next we saw the red pandas. I didn't even know we were going to see them and I LOVE them! They are like a cross between a panda and a raccoon. They have the cutest faces you've ever seen. I'm talking adorable like a baby harp seal....

Heading for the trees!

They spend a lot of their time climbing into trees. They're very agile, UNLIKE their fat black and white cousins. Look at that cool tail!

Exhibit A: Not going to climb a tree... Seriously though, how can you not love the way they lie all over each other while they just eat and eat...

We watched this group of teen-agers for a long time. They were hysterical! My fav was the one standing up. He stayed in that spot the whole time, just kickin' it. The only thing he needed was a backward baseball cap.

Lovin' the Pandas.

On our way out we stopped to incorporate some new family members into the fold. So now we have Pandy and Melody. Nothing like getting adopted and getting right on a plane. As it turns out, our Panda friends would do a lot better with the high altitude of Tibet than their new owners...

Xi'an

  China Video Part 2: Xi'an (Click Here!)

 When we last left the trip we were boarding a train to Xi'an. The train was a BIG adventure and lots of fun. Here's a pic of our little compartment. If someone wanted to stand up we had to take turns. It was tight!

 I actually slept surprisingly well on the train. We woke up in the morning with about an hour to chill on the train before our arrival and the kids were more than happy to hang out on the upper bunks with their D.S. things. Thank goodness because we wouldn't have all fit sitting down below. I can't imagine sharing one of these units with 3 strangers!

 We were picked up by Mr. Bruce and Driver and they took us to our hotel for breakfast. On the way we got our first glimpse of the Ming Dynasty city wall surrounding the old central part of Xi'an. Zombie Apocalypse approved!

 Our hotel was really nice but not as charming and historic as the one in Beijing. We were only there for one night. We put all our things in our room, ate breakfast and headed out to see the Terra Cotta Warriors. This is maybe the most significant archaeological find of the last few decades. They only discovered them in the 70's and the farmer that found them is still alive and hangs out signing autographs. Talk about moving up in the world! The warriors are pretty darn cool. They are all different!

 Click on this one and you can see their faces and how they are all unique:

 That is a cubic butt-load (BL3) of terra-cotta statues. They're pretty sure that the emperor killed one real person for every statue that's in there. Wrap your mind around THAT one.

 That picture above is only one pit of THREE! In pit 2 they haven't even started excavating. They have some cool ares where you can see some of them close-up. This guy is a kneeling archer.

 My own little warrior....

 After the warriors we went to the Wild Goose Pagoda and climbed to the top. And Sasha lost her hat. There was this nice little temple where services were going on.

 The inside of the temple:

 After we climbed up the Pagoda we had an ice cream in a beautiful park. There were chickens and roosters all over the place (?) and one mama chicken had a new batch of chicks!

 Up close:

The one souvenir that Jeff wanted was a hand-carved family seal. We hung around and then found a guy that would make you a custom seal in 10 minutes. I have to admit, I was a BIG SKEPTIC about this guy's ability to hand carve a seal including the name 'STOLASZ' and a bunch of Chinese, (all of it backwards) at ALL, never mind in 10 minutes, but the dude pulled it off!

 A close-up of him making it:

 And the final product: How cool is that?!?

After the Pagoda we really wanted to see the city wall. Mr. Bruce and driver brought us there and then we wanted to just walk and hang out so we made a plan to meet them and then took off. The city wall around the old city limits of Xi-an is pretty impressive. Of course now it's just a tiny, walled-off section in the middle of a modern, sprawling city, but back then everything inside the wall was it. And let me tell ya, they were well protected in there. That wall is something else. And the top of it is so wide and so nice it's like having a public park that goes on for miles!

 The city wall with some of the old guard buildings.

 That night for dinner we had a traditional dumpling banquet - something Xi'an is famous for. I don't have pics of this but there is plenty of video in the move clip at the top of this post. Then we headed home and got ready to hit the sack early because our flight to Tibet was at 7am. I was just getting out the cold-weather clothing when I got a call from Lhasa. It was someone from our travel company and they told us that the government lost our Tibet visa! They had scrambled and re-applied and gotten it again as of 5pm but there was no way to get it to us by our flight in the morning. So they wanted to know if we would be willing to fly to Chengdu the next day and see the Giant Pandas first and they would have someone fly FROM TIBET to meet us to hand us our visa so we could then board a plane to Tibet. Were we willing to do that?!? You betcha! And I was more than just a little bit astounded and grateful for how much trouble everyone in the organization had gone through to fix an unforseen travel snafu. What a bunch of rock-stars! So we packed away the Tibet stuff and got ready to head to Chengdu.
The next day we had some time to kill before our flight so after a nice breakfast we tried out the hotel pool:

Then we headed to the famous Muslim district to sample some street food and hunt down some lunch. It was very cool:

 The Muslim district is a tangle of food stands, vendors, restaurants and little shops. It was really fun to explore and we ended up getting a few nice little things there.

 Checking out the wares:

We pulled into a little restaurant and ordered some mystery items! It's always interesting to see the difference between what you THINK you ordered and what actually comes out. It was a fine meal though and we got to try a lot of new dishes that we had never tasted before.

Then it was time to head back to the hotel, collect our things and go to the airport for our flight. While we were waiting Sasha and I experimented with some of the cool hair thingys we got in the market place. Quite nice eh?

Beijing Part 2!

 Video: China Part 1: Beijing!

On Monday Kimmy and our Driver pulled up bright and early for another big day. We were headed to the Ming Tombs and the Great Wall!

We drove way out of the city to visit the Sacred Way and the tombs. The amazing thing was that even that far out there was still so much pollution! It was not like our first day in Beijing at all. I couldn't stop sneezing.

 The sacred way was a long paved avenue lined with many, many, MANY stone statues...

 ...and the kids wanted their picture taken with all of them!

 And the Chinese wanted their picture taken with the kids. The worst is when an entire tour group would line up for their turn for a picture. This would have been way cool if I could have charged them money but I couldn't so after a few shots we just had to walk away.

 Each animal had a match across the way and then the next pair of animals would be that same kind of animal but standing.

 Cool stone carving at the tombs.

We always play the game "win, fail or meh" in our family, and to be honest the tombs were a "meh". They're just not that exciting. So I entertained myself by taking pictures of some signs with fabulous English translations:

 It LOOKS sunny and nice in these pictures but it was smoggy and foul. You can see it better in the video and when we took that we were even farther away from the city!

 After the tombs Kimmy took us to a Jade museum/carving place/tourist trap. This ship was amazing. It had chains all over it carved out of jade. Jeff told the kids "be really careful because if you break anything you don't go to college". I was impressed that Teddy didn't start breaking things on purpose after that.

 We drove about an hour and finally arrived at the Great Wall. We went to the Mutianyu section of the wall which is farther out but less swarmed by tourists so that was great. We took a ski lift up to the wall.

 It was AMAZING! Hard to imagine anyone walking the whole thing let alone building it.

 We hiked out until we hit a section that hadn't been restored yet and was off-limits.

 I had no idea how STEEP some parts of the Wall are!

 My 2 little adventurers. They whined a bit about how far Mom and Dad wanted to hike on the Great Wall of China. So we used the time to tell them all about it's history and why it was built.

 So of course then it was time for an historical re-enactment. In this photo the part of the Mongol Horde is played by Dad and Teddy while the surprised Chinese guards are played by Sasha and Mom.

 Cool guard-towers every couple of segments:

 Wow!

 It really is pretty darn incredible.

 Then it was time to go down. We rode these cool toboggan things in a metal track all the way down to the base. It was a blast!

 We were at the Wall all afternoon. When we left we had about a 2 hour drive back into Beijing all the way to this epic train station:

 Kimmy led us through a maze of levels and then back outside and then into the main entrance. He gave us our tickets and showed us where to go to wait for our train and then it was time to say good-bye.

 We ate dinner at the station, used a bathroom that makes the ones in Grand Central look like surgically disinfected jewels, and then our train arrived. We were off to Xi-'an!