Tuesday, August 07, 2007

A Brand New Day

This morning Janet and I moved into a new room at our hostel, Sim's Cozy Guest House and are excited. I think both of us are feeling much better after a night's sleep and taking a shower.

The hostel is surprisingly very nice. They seem to have anticipated every need a traveler might have and provided for it. We have clean bathrooms, a courtyard garden sitting area, computer lab, bar and restaurant, movie room, travel office and more. The best part about it is the extremely friendly customer service, which in my experience, has not always been the rule in China.


Janet and I sat down this morning and started to plan out our itinerary for the next few days, beginning to pick rooms and found out information about travel arrangements. Things are going so much better today!

In the afternoon we walked to the "Culture Street" area of Chengdu where we were pleasantly not harassed by vendors. Signs at the entrance warned in both Chinese and English to not harass the foreigners along with a host of other rules, that were more often than not worded in the silly English translations that people generally refer to as "Chinglish." Right off of Culture Street (which is a 3-minute walk from our hostel) we paid 5 Yuan to enter the Wenshu Monastery.

From the helpful map that the hostel provided for us, I discovered the route to Pete's Tex-Mex restaurant and decided that this was too good an opportunity to pass. On the bus ride to the restaurant, I meet two Canadians that had been backpacking in China for the past few months. I told them about our tedious 35-hour train ride and they told me about how they had not been able to get train tickets out of Beijing so they had taken 90 hours worth of bus rides over the past week on the way to Urumqi, a remote desert town in the extreme west of China.

After discovering that we were all headed to the same restaurant, we all decided to dine together. Since they had already been in China for a while and too many sites, Janet and I were able to glean some helpful information from them and learned that one of the pair, coincidentally also named Scott, had previously taught English in China for two years. The other of the pair, Justin, was almost out of money and planning to return to Canada in a few weeks to try and get a job in a diamond mine for a few months in order to earn more money for his next big trek. It was quite an adventurous lifestyle and interesting to exchange stories about our time in China and joke about the scams and hawkers of cheap wares at tourist spots.

The restaurant itself was an ex-pat haven. An oasis of Mexican food in the middle of China. It was fun to look around and see all of the other "white" people at the tables joking with each other and relieved to find tacos, burritos and chips and salsa. Though I'm sure I could have found better quality Mexican food in Tallahassee, in Chengdu my Texas Burrito seemed like a little taste of Heaven. Before leaving, Janet and I joked with the backpackers that we would see them there later in the week, and we very likely may run into them if we go back. If you ever happen to find yourself in Chengdu and in need of a break in food, I would recommend Pete's Tex-Mex.

Tomorrow morning, Janet and I are going to be headed to the Giant Panda Breeding (大熊猫) and Research Center and are very excited! I'm sure that there will be an album full of cute Panda pictures up on my webshots in the next few days, so be sure to check it out.

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