broad minded » impressions of China

Sichuan province is in the middle of China, west from Shanghai, and is famous in China for its good and spicy food, the traditional tea-houses, the nice landscape and beautiful girls. I went there last week together with Georg, Min and Mark, a friend of Georg and Min from France, who also studied at our university in Shanghai. We started last Tuesday (two days before the national festival in the 1st of March) and came on back Sunday night. By train it would probably take about 40 hours to get there, but we took the airplane, which took only about 3 hours.

Map of Sichuan:

Größere Kartenansicht

On Tuesday, the first day, after we arrived at the airport of Sichuan’s capital ChengDu, we got to our hotel and then met a good friend of Min and her husband, who are living there. We ate “Hotpot” together, a bowl full of water with chili for cooking all kinds of meat and vegetables. And although, by now, this kind of meal also exists in regions all across China, its origin is in Sichuan. Min’s friends explained us, what to see in Sichuan and in the evening invited us to have some drinks in a traditional (but commercialized) part of the town.

On Wednesday morning we met with them again and had breakfast, a soup, which was… spicy of course (for me, not only a bit) In the afternoon we started off by bus to JiuZhaiGou, a national park north of Sichuan’s capital ChengDu. Since the bus took 11 hours, there was not much more to do on this very day :-/ There we had a hotel near the entrance of the national park JiuZhaiGou.

On Thursday we went into JiuZhaiGou. Since it is a quite big natural park, we moved around in it for the whole day, by bus or walking. I especially liked the blue-coloured lakes and the waterfalls, which were whole waterfall landscapes, actually. This place is over 3000m above sea-level and I really felt the thin air up there by having a little headache and weaker constitution than usual (yes, even weaker ). In addition, the nights were very cold.

On Friday we visited another natural park called HuangLong (”yellow dragon”), which was recommended by Min’s friends. Unfortunately we were a bit disappointed, because there was not much left of the blue-water-terraces the park is famous for. The reason for the missing water was not clear to us but we assumed, that it was just because of the dry weather in this part of the year. Some of the pictures are very nice though

On Saturday we got to ChengDu back by bus (again 11 hours) and watched a traditional show in the evening, showing dances, tea-pouring-artistics (really ), costumes, a comedy and the famous mask-shifting. Mask-Shifting is originated in Sichuan and means people, dancing in costumes and wearing masks they can exchange in a matter of milli-seconds (maybe ^^), which was really amazing.

Sunday was for the pandas in ChengDu These funny animals were as lazy as a living being can be, mainly focussing on eating, sleeping and sometimes moving (either if there’s nothing more to eat or they lie uncomfortable). In the evening we visited a temple and made ourselves ready to go back to Shanghai.

All in all it was a nice trip, except of the long and tiring bus trips.

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This entry was posted on Friday, May 9th, 2008 at 7:28 pm and is filed under English (英文). You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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