Chengdu - City of Giants

Chengdu is another large city; I'm still waiting to see the countryside.  But there were two giant things to see in Chengdu: the Giant Buddha of Leshan and the giant pandas.  The Giant Buddha is carved out of stone and is over 230 feet tall.  The people standing at the bottom of the picture don't even come up to his toenails.  First we took a short boat ride to get a good look at the whole statue from the river, and then we climbed up a few hundred steps to see the statue up close and personal.  Very impressive.



And what can you say about the giant pandas?  I know they are bears, but they really are cute.  There are dozens of them at the panda center, so we walked through for a couple of hours, watching them.  We went early in the morning when they are most active and got to see two youngsters wrestling.  Most of the older pandas just eat bamboo and sleep a lot.  The nursery was mostly empty as only two babies were born this year.

Kasey and Ruby joined me in Chengdu to visit the Giant Buddha and the giant pandas.

Besides the giants, in Chengdu I saw a few interesting things about modern Chinese life.  As usual, the central park in the city is the People's Park, and as usual, retired people were ballroom dancing, line dancing, or exercising.  It does seem strange to me to see people ballroom dancing in the middle of a park with a boombox as accompaniment.  But that was not the strangest thing that I saw in People's Park.  Of course, the parents of unmarried thirty somethings have a marriage mart although it is less elaborate than the one in Shanghai.  There, the posters generally included a picture of the prospective mate.  In Chengdu, the papers have just the important information about the "child" ... his age, profession, salary, and whether he has a car or house.

Locals sit for hours in a tea house where the tea is served in large thermoses.

Some of the people are not just drinking tea.  While sitting in the restaurant or elsewhere in the park, someone is cleaning their ears with a set of instruments that look like they belong to a dentist.  My guide proudly told me that ear cleaning was a Chengdu specialty.  When I mentioned that I had seen it once in Xi'an and wondered about it, she became very defensive, telling me that the practice was originated in Chengdu and could not be authentic in Xi'an.

Okay.  Chengdu is the city of giants and ear cleaning.  Who knew?