Chengdu – day 2

We had another wonderful day in Chengdu – thanks especially to our hosts from SWUFE. We began with a visit to the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding. This base was established in 1987 with 6 Giant Pandas rescued from the wild. Today there are close to 100 Giant Pandas living there. We were lucky enough to see many of them – especially the latest group of about one dozen three month olds. It is interesting to note that Giant Pandas do not easily mate – and when they are successful, since the babies are so incredibly small, many times they do not survive. The base has done much research in perfecting the ability to artificially inseminate the Giant Panda. If you want to learn more about the Chengdu Research Base visit their web site at http://www.panda.org.cn/english/index.htm.
Our next stop was a “typical” Chinese lunch. For all of us from the US – I’m not sure where our idea of Chinese food came from. Nothing here looked anything like what we get from our local Chinese restaurant. Everything we ate was delicious – and probably much healthier than what we get from the US Chinese restaurants. When we asked our guide if the meal would be ending with a fortune cookie, he had no idea what we were talking about!
In the afternoon, we visited the Wuhou Temple. The temple was built in the 6th century to commemorate Zhuge Liang, known for his great wisdom. We ended the day with a stroll through JINLI Street – an ancient street which was recently restored and opened to the public in 2004. I has many wonderful shops and places to relax and eat.
I think that we have now seen everything our Baruch students from Chengdu advised were “must see” places. Tomorrow we finally get to visit SWUFE.