It started off as a love affair - the hostel has clean, new (hotel standard) double rooms for the ridiculous price of 120 yuan (=$20) and we have the famous "pock-marked Grandma Chen's bean curd" right around the corner. The love wore off a bit after we discovered that their internet connection is a joke and practically useless and electricity is not a given - there's a power outage for several hours every night. They must be scheduled because the power comes back at 1am, so I guess it's to save electricity on the really hot days (of which we had a few recently, probably around 37C). But then, the roach we spotted crawling over the table in the common room didn't help...
Ah... Chengdu :) Finally back in the city! I feel much more like a fish in the water here :) It is really nice - full of parks and temples and tea houses - they're really everywhere! We went to the People's Park, which among monuments for the Martyrs of the 1911 Railroad Protection movement, also houses several tea houses that were packed to the brim. We spotted a string of white sheets of paper - at closer inspection they turned out to be personal ads for soliciting marriage.
On the form you were asked to list you age, income, educational background, whether you own an apartment and if you were ever married/had kids. There were a lot from elder men, but also young people aged 27-30 were among them. The salary range I saw was 1,500-5,000RMB (so a postdoc would be in the middle range - thank goodness I don't have to worry about that anymore ;-)). I wouldn't be surprised if most of the people reading that were not looking for themselves but for their sons or daughters.
We also visited a Taoist Temple - they are becoming my favorite :) This one was called the green ram temple and is pretty huge. It has a copper goat statue which is highly revered by locals and therefore has a very shiny beard. Next to it is another statue which supposedly represents parts of all 12 zodiac animals... but we couldn't figure them out.
For dinner we tried our old strategy - go to the best hotel in town. In this case a Sofitel. The food was pretty good, but did not live up to our hopes. And they sold us something that clearly tasted like pork as deer - maybe some kind of tapir? ;-) The braised eel with preserved pork (air cured and salted) was pretty good though, it came with mushrooms.
And we have to give the hotel credit for it's great cocktails (that's a first in China!) and wireless internet. So they pretty much satisfy the needs we can't get met in our hostel :) The Sheraton has the better ice cream though (chocolate ice cream over caramelized bananas? Try this at home! Topped with caramelized nuts, whipped cream and shaved chocolate) - but what are Buddhist monks doing there? Admittedly, they were only drinking what looked like apple juice, but what prompted them to go in there in the first place? Did they stay there? We already witnessed senior monks/masters being driven around in their cars and of course every single one owns a cell phone, but it's not the typical yak-butter scented image of monastic life, is it?
Chengdu is also full of street food and fresh fruit (many different kinds of melons and we had an awesome mango). Somehow it reminds me of Nanjing, though a bit less chaotic and cleaner (public toilets are actually usable - you don't faint from the smell within 5min). It feels bigger and it's more spread out. Space is maybe not so scarce here as in the east. The outskirts look a lot like Shanghai, actually - apartment buildings over apartment buildings, all at least 20 stories high, clustered in parks. The only difference is, there's more space between them (and they're not that many). I guess they'll fill that in in the coming years.
We drove by one apartment complex that looked definitely American, very much L.A. like, and even the 4 lane highway with nothing left or right reminded us of the States. Downtown has older apartment buildings, many seem to be from the sixties, and although they seem to have a nice living atmosphere, the habit of just throwing garbage out of your window (sometimes onto the neighboring roof) also prevails here. Sadly.
Trip to Huanglong Xi - another yellow dragon. A village that is so picturesque, allegedly over 150 films were shot here. Well, If you ever wondered why the backdrop in Chinese films looks so fake - there you have it. According to the Lonely Planet, this place has been "beautified for tourists, but by and large it's been done right." What does that mean about wrong?! Nevertheless, we got some pretty good fish and tofu in a riverside restaurant that also had cold beer - what more can you ask for? Maybe for a little less harassment from the people offering massage or ear cleaning in tea houses. But it's quite fun to sit in this bustling atmosphere, with people gambling over cards or playing mahjong, others selling snacks, most just dozing off in the summer heat. Was it worth the one-hour bus ride here? Probably not, but we're not in any hurry...
Leshan - another touristy town that has acquired fame status, due to a 71m meter high sitting Buddha statue. The town seems to have cashed in proper, I have never seen so many fancy apartment buildings in a town this small. Well, good on them, but why can't they have something good to eat for lunch then? We followed a Lonely Planet recommendation for something "a little fancy" - did I mention that this book SUCKS???? Big time?! That was the most insulting food I had so far. What a waste of a meal. At least we found a nice coffee house, it seems to be a chain "Good wood(!) coffee"
whose theme is Austrian Kaffeehaus - or their take on it at least. Everything is decorated in cutest little flower designs and the waitresses wear light blue dresses with frills and apron - couldn't help but being reminded of Austria :) They must have stolen that concept from a similar place in Japan, though, because the deep bow we received from all the waitresses was neither Austrian nor Chinese... Coolest thing - they had a GO-board! So the afternoon was saved - at least for B. who was happy to have someone who'd indulge him in playing a board game :) It was just too unbelievably hot outside anyway. We had been watching a crowd, who - under Buddhist chantings - was releasing fish into the local river.
They formed a row and handed bucket-loads (literally) of fish from one to another, all the way from the water-tank truck parked on the curb down the stairs to the river bank. A few monks and nuns were there to direct the spectacle, not sure if it was them who had bought the fish to be set free. Apparently, it's a Buddhist custom to buy animals from captivity and set them free - I guess it's good for your karma and stuff. At a sizzling 37 degrees outside, I am sad to report not all the fish made it alive down to the water (they also had been cooped up in the tank that was loaded to the brim, standing in the sun) , but I guess it's the intention that counts? What else? Oh right, the giant Buddha. It sits there alright. Supposedly pacifying the waters of the fast-flowing Dadu river (which locals use to jump in the river and let themselves be hauled along, just to climb out a few hundred meters downstream - a fun past-time if the river wouldn't look so damn brown - actually,
they bathe in the second river, the Minjiang, but they're both equally brown), but probably it was the rubble that fell into the stream when the Buddha was carved out of the rock that did the job. We have to stop visiting places because there's something "there."
Sichuan opera - well, the touristy version of it. We got a compilation of genres - opera, dance, music, fire spitting and face changing... unfortunately, most of the music was not live, and the singing that was was pretty bad. The male dancers clearly have a basic kung fu training, it looks like martial acrobatics (watch "Farewell my concubine" for the more or less true history of Beijing opera). The female dancers basically just walk around in tiny steps and wave their long shawls, or head feathers in this case, which had a rather comical effect. The face changing was truly impressive though. With a wave of a hand or fan they change their masks - you can't figure out how they do it even if you watch very closely. I once saw a movie about an old face changing master.
The key, as I remember, was that the masks are painted on extremely thin rice paper. But I don't remember what they do with them - suck them into the mouth maybe? That would not explain the whole body costume change though... We also got a "solo" by an
Erhu-player (that's a two-stringed instrument, played upright held on one's knee, which can make sounds from a howling cat to a screaming horse), which might have been good if it hadn't been for the overly sentimental background music, that was clearly not played by traditional instruments and did not feel traditional at all. The part I liked best was an excerpt from a traditional opera - the fight of Liu ??? with three ???, something about the Han dynasty shall rule... I would like to see the whole story (with English captions) and have some decent singers for a change. Those were clearly not the freshest anymore, or they were quite drunk, they seemed to have a hard time moving straight in their heavy costumes.
All in all we liked Chengdu quite a lot. It's so relaxing to be in a place where not everybody gapes at you because you're a "Longnose" and you can just go about your own business... and enjoy the good food :)
The "Spring City" - Downtown Kunming is excruciating boring - malls around "People's Road" and a big "government square" - same old, same old... but the neighborhood around the university and Green Lake Park is a really nice hangout-spot; an eclectic mix of boutiques, pottery, tea and upscale liquor stores (the latter mostly selling Mao Tai, the most famous bai jiu, which supposedly can be good if you spend about twice as much as for a nice single Malt Whiskey) as well as cheap student eateries, bars and cafe's. Actually, I'd go as far as saying that I have never seen such a concentration of bars and cafe's anywhere in China. And the best thing? Some of them are really good! There's a French cafe with irresistible chocolate and raspberry tarts and their home-made bread beats the German bakery in Nanjing by far! Another cafe sells Illy coffee and Belgian beer (Rochefort!) - how to choose? 
But no, the really best part is that these places are not just frequented by tourists (we seem to be the only ones) or expats (occasional sightings) but by the locals, many seem to be students. It doesn't feel like in Nanjing, where bars either seem to cater to Westerners or appear to be an attempt to copy something Western just to be fashionable. The people here make these places their own, i.e. they usually come out to play cards (Mahjong and chess are not really popular with the young crowd, that's something for granny in the park's tea house).
The most popular game by far is San Guo Sha (The Three Kingdoms, based on one of The Four Chinese Classics), which B. already acquired :) We just have to figure out how to play it. But supposedly it's sort of a mock off of a game called "Bang," which some expats tried to play with Chinese friends and they ended up changing the game to a Chinese context and supposedly it's much more fun than the original. I wonder if this is also popular with the overseas Chinese crowd?
Noteworthy food: Over-the-bridge noodles. The story goes that a wife who had to bring her husband lunch to his study retreat on an island (over the bridge), always had the problem that the food wasn't fresh anymore when she got there. On day she discovered that if the soup she cooked had a layer of oil on top, the soup could still be boiling hot even if removed from the fire. So, she'd carry this soup to her husband and add the raw ingredients by the time she got there - they would still be cooked but not be over-cooked. So, in restaurants you get an earthenware pot with soup, a sizzling layer of oil on top, and you are served raw ingredients that always include pork (in thin slices), egg (we had quail egg), noodles and greens (scallions), and you can order mushrooms and other stuff on top. Then you place all ingredients quickly in your broth and play with your food! Quite nice and tasty, but they should cut down the MSG in the soup.
And of course, Kunming has temples and other visit-worth stuff, but I won't bore you with that. One place we were utterly disappointed by is the LOFT, supposedly a factory district turned art gallery (like "798" in Beijing), but it was really lame. Most places were closed and the few paintings we saw were anything but avantgarde.
