Lost in China Day 3

Continue from previous incident.

I wasn't suppose to be here, none of us. We are suppose to crossing desert, weird town, enjoying the perfect boredom without internet and cellphone signal.

The fact is, we are still in Chengdu. Not too bad, at least we have the time to visit places that we missed.

The familiar view from our guest house window.

First destination today is 宽窄巷子, literally Wide Narrow Alley. 300 years of history, the alley is combined of 3 parts which are Wide Alley, Narrow Alley, and a Well Alley. The allies inherited old
Qing Dynasty architecture, which now already merged well with tourism, snack shops, classic theater, souvenir shops, and and and, Starbucks.

Find the odd.

A number of people are selling something call 老冰棍 (Old Ice Stick), in a polystyrene box. Out of curiosity, so I approached a boy and asked: 

什么是老冰棒？

the epic reply is: 老冰棒就是小时候的味道啊!

Meet the original Panda 1000

Entrance to Wide Alley

Is just this wide.

This is special. They called it ear picking. Kind of like lock picking, the sifu has an arsenal of tools with various shapes. The purpose is not just to clean your ear, but to make you feel comfortable and relax too. Some ancient art...

The place below is call 龙堂戏院, a Chinese Opera Theater.  We were attracted by it, because the Sichuan Face Changing Performance will start in half an hour. How can we missed this stuff? The Face Changing is not an whole hour show, so they added several other performance like Long Kettle, Chinese joke opera, knife throwing(?!) performance, and finally face changing to end it.

Moral of the story, do not have eye contact with those people. If not because of this video, I thought it was real stuff.

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Next, after a quick lunch, we went to 锦里古街。This place has been around since Three Kingdom era, with a slightly merchant/tea house/whorehouse feel, just like how you see in most Hong Kong/China drama. Buildings had been modified to be restaurants, snack stops, souvenir shops etc.

This is magical, walk through that gate, and immediately feel like passing through time tunnel.

Welcome to Jin Li!

Map

三国蜀汉城

Blessing tree

Our dark secret alley :)

Scene just like in drama: a lady will row a boat crossing under the bridge, calling people to buy her Little Boat Porridge.

Quite a hot day, with chance of shower. Tomorrow evening will be the flight time to Lhasa. God bless everything is fine.

Lost in China Day 2

China has the same timezone as Malaysia, despite her large geographical area. This is in my opinion better than United States who separate their areas by timezone, and day light saving, my god.

Good morning, city of Panda. Morning in Chengdu during July is quite similar in Malaysia, except more pedestrians, more bicycles, more honks.

Guest house uncle drew the nearby convenient destinations in his wall, bravo. Breakfast is quite accessible everywhere, after a short stroll, we decided on a restaurant, and start our first interaction with local people.

Surprise, no one understand local dialect. It sounds like Mandarin, but we only can get a few keywords in between. We read the menu item in proper mandarin, they understood, but they just replied in their dialect, so we just replied 好。

Almost every meals in Chengdu, Sichuan are spicy. Not the curry, rendang, merah, type of spicy. It starts with numbing your tongue, warm up your stomach, sweat gland fully open, and end up in toilet few hours later, every time.

Plan of the day: visit Chengu Panda Breeding and Research Center, pack up, redeem our prebooked train ticket at 6pm, and board the train to Lhasa, Tibet.

Transportation in Chengdu is not as advance like Tokyo or Seoul, but straightforward road design makes it easy to understand where am I standing in this city. But the famous Panda Research facility located at outskirt of Chengdu and not reachable by subway, so bus is the better option.

It is not hard to travel in China, you just follow the crowd. When crowd get on the bus, you follow; when crowd get off the bus, you followed, and you will get to your destination. Joking. But seriously people mountain people sea. After 1 hour of ride and interchange, we are there.

This is the giant panda breeding and research center, housing more than 100 pandas from wild and new birth. Never seen a real panda in my life, curiously want to know how the real one made the world burns.

The park is big, mostly covered in greens, especially by many species of bamboos, the main food source of panda. There are options of taking tram in the park, to several major stations.

Summer is not a good timing to visit here, because panda hates hot, so all pandas were relocated to indoor.

We are lucky, a baby panda was just born few days ago (photo is a little blur). They look just like mochi. Very soon, they will start having kilograms of bamboo everyday.

Just like mochi

A slightly older one. All newborns are placed in incubators.

They were suppose to hanging out here....

But instead... Let's hope hot summer ends soon.

This is not raccoon.

Weather at 2pm is just as hot in Malaysia, maybe hotter. Suppose to visit another attraction call 宽窄巷子 (literally Wide and Narrow Street), but we out of time. Save it till next time.

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The trip back to the guest house is another 1 hour, we were discussing what to do on the 40 hours train ride later, what food to bring, what games to pass time. We even bought a lot of grapes, apples, some weird local fruits, cup noodles, drinks.

According to the tour guide in Tibet, we are required to collect the prebooked train ticket at North Interstate Train Station, sounds like easy job. Carrying our luggage and just bought food,  we reached there by 7 pm, passed up our passports, waiting patiently for the officer to process our tickets.

And here comes the nightmare:

3 out of 5 persons are unable to retrieve ticket, due to error on the name. Fuck. Immediately, I called my tour guide who bought the ticket for us about this issue, but China now is not China then. The "I help you you help me" policy don't seems to work that well now.

你给我点时间，我们这里办事都是靠关系。 My ass.

For 1 whole hour, we talked to at least 10 officers, face to face and via phone, no one can fix this shit, the officer can only advice us to get partial refund. Until 8:15pm, right before the train depart, we gave up on this, and requested partial refund... Fuck my life, my wasted roaming phone calls, my sweat, my time, my money.

Tour guide was very sorry about this, sending me proof that he didn't make mistake when purchasing train ticket. So whose fault? System? But that don't matter anymore. He is very responsible in this issue, and purchased flight ticket for us to enter Lhasa on 2 days later.

If life is a movie, this is a fucked up beginning of an adventure.

Still grateful that the tour agency willing to take full responsibility.

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Checking in the same guest house, saying hi to the same people, and the big dog 莎莎!

Dinner suppose to be fruits, biscuit, and cup noodles on train, put it aside, let's go for local steamboat.

Yup! This the what local call the best Sichuan steamboat. Even the air in this restaurant is sell like chili and pepper makes you can't stop coughing. The way we have it is, most meat and vegetables are cooked in the middle herbal soup, while the hot spicy soup which covered in chilies and peppers are for quick dipping only. Look at beside's table, those local people actually finished the spicy soup!

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Now, we just unexpectedly got extra 2 days of travel time in Chengdu.

Let's call it a day, ok?

Next day, back to the past.

Lost in China Day 1

This is the dream trip. Something we had planned for 5 years (At least the first idea happened since then, and a few emails had been exchanged with the tour guide). Just like typical graduates, I worked hard, but seldom play hard, especially the last 3 years, it was the most tiring period of my life. So, right after delivered the letter, we resumed the emails, fixed the date, and get the flight.

Tibet, is the destination. one of the most isolated place on earth.

Tibet has one of the most kaopekaobu policy for foreign tourist. Technically governed by China, Tibet requires special permissions and VISA to enter, and with compulsory tour guide service. Because there can be 'sometimes' politically unstable, and the Chinese (From now on, Chinese means China resident) would not want foreigners to see it. (Dumb, we have Internet). The funniest thing is when you apply for China VISA, we can't tell the officer that we are going to Tibet, because they will ask for Tibet VISA; but you need China VISA first, before you apply Tibet VISA. Inception.

So, this is not the place you can just pick up the backpack and go. I wasn't thinking much when I bought the ticket, I just want to escape, I don't care. And lucky to have few companions who are crazy enough to join me.

Located at average 4000m above sea level, Tibet is a plateau that only accessible by train, some domestic flights, and a few brave souls who love driving thousands of kilometers for days from nearby cities. So we just booked AirAsia from KL to Chengdu, and back from Xi'an to KL. Why? Because that is the cheapest combination at that time.

After exchanged more than 140 emails with Dhondup, our tour agency person, everything seems fully prepared. The plan is, we are flying to Chengdu on 15th July, and take the world highest Qinghai Railway to Tibet on 16th July, 40 hours later, we will reach Lhasa, largest city in Tibet. On 26th July, we take flight from Lhasa to Xi'an, and back to Malaysia on 28th July, macam yes.

So, 15th July is the day. Get to airport, to the gate, shown some fuck face by the rude AirAsia lady for being the last one to board, and took off. We didn't even late, just last.

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Everyone knows how often Chinese notoriously get on news, especially on flight. It is true. I had never sit in a plane that noisy and always full of requests "I want beer", "I want this", "I want that". No one gives a shit to safety signal, and people DO SMOKE IN TOILET.

This is little gross, and that might not be from Chinese, but since 90% of the flight are them, so I would be racist for this. Out of sudden, Air Stewardess job don't seems that glamorous at all. Now every time I see Air Asia advertisement, I can image a gross face air stewardess picking up a lady napkin from toilet, because it is not flush-able (I tried).


Now I know why that AirAsia lady at the airport gate show us fuck face, because we look like them.


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Arriving at Chengdu Shuangliu airport at 11pm, deal with hogging taxi driver who willing to fetch us all in one shot, and 5 of us decided to take 2 metered taxis to our guest house, still 2 times cheaper with night rate.

We overnight at an apartment using prebooked Airbnb service, and first thing in the house surprised me --

莎莎！

View and layout of the guest house living hall during day time. Night time will be turned into projector room, everyone watching 《中国好声音》

It was pass twelve when we reached there, dinner was limited. Followed a map drawn by the owner, we had 串烧for dinner. Got to specially ordered 微辣, because the spiciness is just unbearable.

 

王老吉is in fact very popular drink in China, people drink it in any occasion.

So this is day 1. Next day: Shit does happens.

Insomnia

One of the rare night.

Must be the can of coffee at 3pm. So tired yet the sleepy mood is not kicking in. This is again a long procrastinating night.

Study shows that the more time you spent on Facebook, the more terrible you feel. It might be true, mostly by peer pressure, especially looking what others had achieved, while I am still standing at the same spot. Feel like I am not the master of my life, unable to achieve what I want.

This is the place that I was quite active during my university moment, read back what I wrote, I seems to proceed not much since I stepped out that gate.

Felt into the trap designed by the society, money, capitalism, live the life that society wants you to live, to serve the needs of the power, everything is about profit and value.

So many things want to do, to achieve, yet so little time to do it. Seeing time flies, chances wasted, doing uncertain things, and still try to persuade myself to push a little more, just a little more, and more, just because I believe every time is so close to hit the jackpot, yet still see nothing.

Guess I just need to try get back to sleep.