More from Chengdu…

I’ve had a great three days in Chengdu -- capital of the Sichuan province in China.  Here, I met my Singapore colleague, Shirley, who is from Chengdu.  She spent the last couple of days showing me around her city and nearby points of interest.  Chengdu is a nice city and I have enjoyed all of the places I have seen and the famous foods that I have eaten.  Here are a few of the things that I did in Chengdu:

First, as water engineers, both Shirley and I were impressed to visit the nearby 都江堰 (or Du Jiang Yan) Irrigation System.  This impressive piece of infrastructure was built about 2,000 years ago to control the floodwaters that perennially devastated Chengdu.  The river was controlled using an ingenious diversion system made up of various spillways, canals, and weirs.  The king had charged the lead engineer, Li Bing, to control the floods with out damming the river – so that the river was still navigable for military and trade purposes.  Li Bing, the grandfather of hydraulic engineers, was regarded with King/God status after his achievement and to this day a temple stands nearby in his name.

One evening, Shirley invited me to her family’s home for dinner.  She has a very close extended family who all live in Chengdu. They meet every weekend for dinner and to play Mahjong – the classic Chinese gambling game using multi-colored tiles.  I got to join for one of these evenings, and it was wonderful!  Shirley’s family were very welcoming and provided me with delicious and homemade local food.  I was able to speak in Mandarin fairly well with Shirley’s mom, but many other relatives were speaking quickly in the local Sichuan dialect, and I had a hard time understanding.  After dinner, we played Mahjong – something I had been eager to experience.  I have played Mahjong a few times in Singapore with friends, and I really like the game.  Shirley told me that her family were avid players, and I was eager to learn the Chengdu rules.  … It was great!  I won the first game and felt pretty excited, but as the rounds continued I found my mind getting exhausted.  Her family plays quite quickly, and I was struggling to think about a dozen things at once: recalling the rules of the game, learning the special Chengdu rules, considering strategy in the game, trying to listen and ask questions in Mandarin, and hearing her aunties and cousins chatting in Sichuan dialect.  Luckily I had Shirley’s mom as my 师傅 (“Shi-Fu”, or my master teacher) [see the picture of me and my 师傅].  It was a lot of fun and I especially enjoyed the local phrase of avoiding the “colorful pig” in the game, by disposing of particularly unwanted tiles.

One night we also visited a Hot Pot restaurant.  This is a famous kind of meal in China, and is particularly famous and tasty in Sichuan.  The restaurant has specially built tables that hold a gas stove in the centre of each.  A pot of spicy broth is placed on the stove, and once the broth is brought to boil, diners use chopsticks and ladles to cook meat, seafood, and vegetables in the pot immediately before eating.  Shirley wanted to give me a truly “authentic” experience and so had me eat river eel, chicken-stomach, cow-stomach, among other assorted vegetables.  So, I was certainly no vegetarian on this trip!  But it was all delicious and I enjoyed every bite. [Pictured is me about to eat some cow-stomach!!]

This morning I went to the Giant Panda Research Centre, just north of Chengdu.  I am sure many of you know that my greatest and oldest childhood friend is Mr. Pandy Dandy (the stuffed animal toy that I was given when I was one year old).  And as a child I always really liked panda bears.  So it was fun to visit the park in China and see the bears munching away on bamboo and relaxing in their enclosures.  The park is very nice, and they have been successful in maintaining a (slightly) growing Panda population for the past few decades.  You can walk along the bamboo shaded pathways and view baby, adolescent, and adult Giant Pandas, as well as the lesser-known Red Pandas.  It was fun, and a nice addition to my trip to Chengdu to visit my friend and co-worker, Shirley.