So Long Chengdu

The time here has gone quickly!  I remember feeling doubtful that we would find enough to fill the long months stretched out ahead of us, but look at us now: we've been mapping out the few remaining days trying to fit in as much as we can, all the things we wished we'd done sooner.  We've left Chengdu behind, so we offer a quick retrospective.  It's a slow city, ready to take a break at the tea house and relax.  Especially in the hours between lunch and dinner, but really throughout the day, both in tea houses and out on the sidewalk, we would see card tables set up - for cards, for mahjong - for hanging out.  We acclimated readily to this lifestyle, and it was only toward the end of our stay when our friends Joey and Tracy came to visit that we finally learned the Sichuan rules of Mahjong and stayed up late into the night playing.  Lazy though we may have been, we did take plenty of pictures of the city that we briefly lived in.
 Above all there was the food, littered with peppers and the mouth-watering zing of Sichuan peppercorns (hua jiao), covered in oil, garlic, ginger.  We'll try to recreate our favorites at home, but how can we compare?  We were once unsure about the numbing, buzzing feeling in our mouths from the hua jiao, but we quickly grew to love the taste.  Even our favorite green onion pancake came with this local standard, crushed into the dough.

Here is a meal from the end of our trip at one of our first Chengdu restaurant discoveries.  Their dry cooked bitter melon (top of the photo) was the best in the city.  Moving clockwise we've got Pea Vines (qing chao wan dou dian), Pepper Chicken (la zi ji), and Garlic Sauce Eggplant (yu xiang qie zi).  Really cheap and excellent food, something that we found in restaurants all over Chengdu.

Another la zi ji.  So many peppers!

Favorite treat!

Across the street from us there was a small bakery (from a wonderful chain of Chinese bakeries) we would often buy coffee and wonderful treats.  It was there that we perfected our ordering of the Americano (mei shi cafe) and experimented with many baked goods hoping that they didn't contain anything too strange (meat!  dried shredded pork!  little hot dogs!  weird meat sandwiches that Mike actually liked!).  Eventually we ended up with a few favorites including the chocolate treat above and mike's favorite three-pack, his "triumvirate bun".

Got yak butter?

Chengdu is a stepping off point for travels to and from Tibet and as a result they have a wonderful Tibetan neighborhood.  We went once out of curiosity, to browse around the Tibetan stores and see what was going on there, and we loved it!  We found a strange little restaurant, really a tiny place, and although it took awhile we eventually sorted out which foods were palatable and which were not.  This is our favorite tea, which was like a sweet Chai tea - on our first visit we made the mistake of ordering the salty yak butter tea.  What a disaster!  It had a thick layer of butter on every cup we poured, making it incredibly rich with the strange taste of yak.  But the noodle soups with stewed meat in them were wonderful.  I have to admit that the Tibet neighborhood was one of my favorites.

 

It took a very long time for Mike and I to learn to play Mahjong.  It wasn't until our friends Joey and Tracy came to visit that we managed to learn the game.  That was mainly due to their great hostel owner who was only too happy to show us.  Chengdu Mahjong is much simpler then American Mahjong and we were able to learn quickly.  All four of us spent an entire day drinking tea and playing.  It was a lot of fun.  After Joey and Tracy left Mike and I tried to figure out some two person games, but without as much success.

Greg Vision was one of the prominent landmarks visible from our apartment.  There was always something going on with the building.  First they stripped the building and then started to repaint.  They replaced windows and lights down the sides of the building, each time setting up a platform hanging down from the roof.  Mike and I were fascinated.  Greg Vision was visible from all over our neighborhood, which made it a good landmark to find our apartment early on when we were frequently disoriented, finding our way around on the public buses (also, Ann maintains that the sign actually says "Crec Vison", but this is beside the point).

Modest Panda

The Chengdu pandas are amazing!  We really enjoyed going to see them.  You could get so close!  Also, the panda restaurant served yam leaves, one of our favorite vegetables.  An added bonus for a trip to the panda sanctuary.  We went again with Joey and Tracy, and were just as entranced the second time around.

Here's the view from our window at evening rush hour (there's the Pacific Department Store, which the Greg Vision billboard sits atop).  Traffic was terrible.  Won't miss that.  Though it did make for an exciting scene, watching the cars, pedestrians and scooters moving around down below.

We'll have to come back soon.