Vacation number 1: Chengdu

Writing about this vacation might be a challenge because it was a long while ago, but I'll try my extra most bestest!🍕 This was our first 4 day vacation, so we didn't really know what we were doing. But it ended up being perfect!
Nisha, Kaylin, Sami, And I left immediately after school on the 14th of April. Our coordinator Helena helped us arrange a car to drive us to the airport, and we flew into Chengdu. Although it was only a 2.5 hour flight, they fed us a giant meal. It wasn't very good. Airplane food, ammirite?

When we arrived that night, we went to our hostel and pretty much planned our trip itinerary. The flip flop hostel is very cute, and the staff was extremely helpful and spoke impeccable English.

The view outside our Hostel

The Mona Lisa,Leonardo Di Vinci, 1503

The next morning, we went to Du Fu's thatched cottage. It's a park in honor of the poet Du Fu. On the journey from the subway station to the park, we saw a man selling a turtle on a stick, got lost in an alleyway we thought might be a shortcut (it wasn't), found noodlepong, and went into a bunch of little gift shops. For lunch I ate some delicious spicy potatoes from a lady's cart. It was only around 75 cents, and so tasty!

Tasty turtle

Alleyway

Tasty noodles

Gift shop filled with pandas

Tasty potatoes

We finally made it to the cottage and as you can see, it was pretty pretty.

Careful!

Kaylin, Nisha, and Du Fu

Waterfall

That night, we explored the big city, then ate at pizza hut. As happy as I was to find a normal pizza place, I was in the mood to be brave, so I  the ordered the durian pizza. Durian is a super stinky fruit, so stinky that it is apparently banned in Singapore's mass transit. But they are very popular in China. The pizza was very sweet and very gross. I would highly recommend not eating it.

This is a picture I found on google images of Durian

Nisha at a fruit stand

*sigh* The city.

The next day was a big day. First, our tour guide picked us up to go see pandas on National Panda day, so that was a dream come true. I have a zillion pictures and videos of them, but here's just a couple. There were red pandas as well as regular pandas, and we got to see so many of them! Every time I thought it would be the last one, we'd turn a corner and bing bing bong, there would be 10 more. We also saw a cool frog on the trail, and some black swans. Then we went to a restaurant where I accidentally shattered a fancy tea cup and we ate eggs.

The View

Red Pandas

Us

Black Swans

Pandas

Cute

Screenshot of frog video

After lunch, we drove 2 hours to see the biggest Buddha in the world. The drive was gorgeous, we got to see a lot of China countryside and rice farms. Then we threw on some super cute orange life vests and took the ferry to get a good look at the Buddha. They aren't kidding when they say it is GIANT. Take a look:

Big bhudda

Watching

Boat ride

When we got home that night, our hostel was having a hot pot party. Everyone staying there came together to eat-hot pot style. (a hot bowl in the middle of the table- add raw food you like- it cooks in the bowl- voila!). We ate with people from France, Japan, Germany, Russia, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, India, England, Taiwan, China (duh), and a few other places. It was so interesting to be in a room full of such different people living such different lives. We went around the room saying why we were in china, and eventually it got to a group of american-looking girls and they said "We're from Utah teaching English with a program called ILP".
What are the chances we'd stay in the same hostel as another ILP group at the same time? Crazy. So we moved to their table and talked for a while. We compared and contrasted our schools and living situations, and concluded that they teach a lot less and their school is a lot more chill about things, but their city isn't as cool as ours. Then we invited them to explore the city and get some real food.

 At the crosswalk by our hostel, there was a guy on the streets waving a puppy in the air and singing. I'd give his voice like a 6, and the dog a perfect 10.

After much deliberation, we decided on a restaurant called Mr. Bear. It had a train track going all over the place, and every seat was occupied by a teddy bear. Super cute. There was a little boy there that kept approaching our table to showcase his English. He'd sing the ABC's or count to 10 or something, then scamper away and hide behind his mom. It was so cute. Then we went back to the hostel, and we never saw him or the other ILP group again.

The next and final day of our vacation, we visited Jingli ancient walking street, and went to the face changing opera.

At Jingli walking street, we purchased lots of cool souvenirs, ate octopus on a stick, got henna tattoos, and had lots of photos taken of us. I don't have any of those pictures, though I do have some pictures that We took.

The opera was neat, that's for sure. Before it started, we went to a tea party where everyone sat at tables and drank tea until it was time to go into the auditorium. There was a man roaming around clinking some freaky looking metal tools together, trying to get people to pay him to clean out their ears. He walked up to me, clinked his tools by my head, and made the noise I imagine a question mark would make if it could talk. I just laughed and said "absolutely no thank you". He moved on to the lady next to me, she said no, but she spoke mandarin, so he kept insisting. They yelled at each other for quite a while, and I can only imagine what they yelled about haha. NO YOU CAN'T CLEAN OUT MY EARS!
The opera itself was quite interesting. The plot was hard to follow, even though there was a monitor  translating what was being sung into English. But I'll be honest: Chinese operas are very whiney and obnoxious in my opinion. I can't comprehend how humans can listen to it and think "wow this is beautiful." Because to me it's worse than nails on a chalkboard.  My favorite lyric from the show was "beautiful girls beautiful girls, 30 percent are beautiful, the rest are dexterous"
Beyond the music, the opera contained a lot of things I liked, like a girl spinning a table on her feet, a guy doing the limbo in a very impressive way with fire on his head, fire breathing, and face changing. I don't know how to post videos, otherwise I would.

After the opera, we ran into this guy who spoke amazing English, without even a hint of an accent. In fact, he talked kind of like one of those gangsta rapper dudes. We told him we wanted noodles and he was like "Nahhhh noodles? I cook noodles so spicy it will make your mouth numb. we could go back to my place and jam to some music and enjoy the numb flavvvaaaaas".
 As inviting as that offer sounded, Sami doesn't like spicy food, so we had to decline :( We talked to him a while longer, then he lead us to a noodle place around the corner and all was well. He got Sami's wechat and left her some funny voice messages.
Then we went to bed, woke up, got on a plane, ate the airplane food, got home, and that was the end of that!