Pandas and Renmin Square

So things have been pretty cool I feel. Three days ago I went to go see the pandas in Chengdu. In the city, there’s a really famous Panda Research Center. From what I understand, this is supposed to be the premiere research center for pandas. They supposedly artificially inseminated a panda successfully within the past 2 months.

Anyways, we left at about 7 a.m. to get there. The place was definitely different from the rest of China I felt. Surprisingly here, they actually enforced the rule where no one could smoke. I know that this is odd, but this was really rare here for China since everyone smokes. So over here was some of our first foreigners on our trip. Since we got there early, there wasn’t really anyone; actually the visitor’s service center was closed at the time we got there.

Our first stop was some panda habitats where they put the pandas individually in this huge cage. Here’s some pictures of these pandas:

I even got a pictures of a huge panda turd!

It actually looks exactly like a horse’s fecal matter; doesn’t it?

After that, we checked out the RED pandas. I know, RED pandas. Their actual name literally translated into English is “red panda”. They are actually an early evolutionary branch of the giant pandas that the pandas that we associate with today. Instead of being in cages, they’re actually in this huge artificial nature habitat as you can see from the picture below.

Also, doesn’t the red panda look like raccoons. It’s interesting that they still have tails. Actually, pandas when they’re born at first have a tail within the first 2 weeks. They actually had a picture of this in the panda museum, but I forgot to take one. Sorry ‘bout that. Getting back to the point, while I was just about finished with the red panda area, I saw a random sign that said that we could hold the red panda and take a picture of it. After some inquiry, I found out that it cost ONLY 50 RMB! That’s just a little over $7! So what did I do? Obviously … I paid to hold the panda and take pictures with it.

So before you can hold the panda, they put me in some makeshift scrubs as you can see in the picture below.

Then I got to hold the RED panda! The panda was surprisingly light. I guess it was about 40 lbs.

Yeah, it was just eating some apples that the lady fed it, as you can see below.

The fur was really coarse, and the claws were amazingly sharp. The whole time, the RED panda basically just ignored me and ate the apple. How rude! Sorry, didn’t get any real pictures of me actually really posing with the panda in my lap, but I was just so into having a panda on my lap, as you can see from the big smile on my face there.

So I was actually quite surprised that they didn’t advertise the chance to hold the RED panda in your lap that much. It was basically just this one sign that’s in the back of the building where you hold the panda in some obscure spot. So yeah… like any of us could do this in the U.S. HAH! And on the bright side, since no one really knew about it, and since there weren’t that many people, I was able to hold the panda for what I would think at last a few good 5 minutes. So this pretty much made the whole trip to China worth it.

Later on, we checked in on the panda nursery. We weren’t supposed to get take pictures of these baby pandas, but I took one at first, since I didn’t see the sign, and then I later snuck one in. hehe I know, that was bad of me, but dude it was a baby panda!

This one is about 14 days old.

This one is about 2 months old.

So after that, got some pictures of the giant pandas in their habitat. Pretty cool. Was at first disappointed a little since they were all sleeping in the trees, as you can see below.

But later on, they called in a panda with some bamboo shoots that they’ve been picking around the park.

Then people got the chance to pet this huge panda that was just sitting on some chair and eating bamboo shoots. It would’ve cost 400 RMB. If there weren’t so many people, I might have done it, but sine there were, people basically just got two pats of the panda, and NEXT! So I definitely think the red panda was a lot more worth it. Well I got some pictures of other people taking pictures with these pandas.

I guess it’s possible that I could ask my girlfriend to photoshop these ugly people out and put handsome me in there instead. haha Just kidding.

So there wasn’t much else here; just a crappy “Swan Lake” with some birds. I was glad that we went to the panda place so early since just about when we were finished, it started raining. After hearing from Ryan that the pandas go crazy when it rains, we ran back to the giant pandas area to check them out. Sadly, they were just sleeping higher in the tree. So nothing much on that. Since it was raining so hard, we just hid in the entrance way where you could take pictures with the baby pandas. I know; you can take a picture with a baby panda too? Well yeah… It’s China. Anything goes. Haha I would’ve taken a picture with these too, but I think 1000 RMB was a little too pricey for me though. Well anyways, because we hid in this entrance way for so long, the people there let us in. Here we got to see the kid pandas. They were pretty cool, I just wish there was more lighting there so that I could get pictures. But I guess these pictures will do.

So later on, we left the panda place and went back to our hotel room to dry off and take a rest sine we’ve been getting maybe 5 hours of sleep for the past 2 nights. There, we decided to walk around the area a little; nothing much there. Then we went to what I found on the internet to be Renmin Square. Being the cheap Asians that we have become here in China, we refused to split 30 RMB ($4) to take a taxi there, and we just walked there aimlessly without knowing where we were going. At least we got to see some cool things like the Sichuan Technology Museum that was closed. Got to also see the Place where they held the FIFA 2007 Women’s World Cup in Chengdu by the Hilton.

Well when we got there, we got to see quite a bit of culture. If I haven’t seen so much of people like dancing in the plaza as seen below, this probably would’ve been really cool, but I’ve seen a lot of this in Beijing.

So the main attraction here in Renmin square was the tea houses here that were supposedly really famous. Some former Chengdu tour guide I met in Beijing highly recommended that I go try these teahouses. Being the backpackers we were, we found them only to be disappointed. It was basically just an outdoor place to drink tea where people either talked amongst their own table, played mah-jang, or played 13 (the card game) while betting.So after this, we just left, and went home. On the way home, we got to see a Chinese version of Red Asphalt on the streets. You remember, that video that you were forced to watch in Driver's Ed.

Since nothing really wrong has gone on this trip so far, something was bound to happen. Well what happened? Well right when we went into Carrefour (a French competitor to Wal-Mart in China), Lynn said “uh-oh”. When I first heard this, I was thinking, did he just crack his glass lenses while cleaning them on this shirt, or did I do something wrong. Actually, the most random thing happened, his frame broke and his pair of glasses, turned into 2 separate eyeglasses entitities. Luckily, we found an optometry place right next door to Carrefour earlier in the day when we were exploring. So I just walked the blind fellow to the place there.

It was here, that Lynn had a revolution where he converted to contacts! I got to say that it was not all that fun, since it took him about 1 hour at least for him to put on his bran new spanking contacts. It was actually quite funny. There were 2 of the workers there and I that tried to either force the contacts in his eye or help him. None of this worked, so a bunch of us gave up after awhile and let him figure it out. Actually, it was quite funny. You could totally see how that when the contact got close to his eye, his eye would just suddenly retract. So I thought that this was great. Haha.

So this was my cool day in Chengdu. The next day I flew to Huang Long / Jiu Zhai Gou, which is where I am currently writing this entry right now.