Chengdu

Chengdu is the capital of Sichuan province, home to spicy food, bamboo forests, and pandas! At a guesthouse in the Philippines I'd picked up a book called The Crippled Tree by Han Suyin. It tells the story of her grandparents, parents, and then herself as a child, and the first part is set in Chengdu. I learned more about China from that book than anything else, and I was excited to see Chengdu for myself.

Obviously, things have changed. Apart from the pandas, there's not that much to see in Chengdu itself, although there are several great places to in the surrounding area. We didn't have time or money for any of that, so we stuck to the city.

We went to the famous River Viewing Park, home to this crazy pavillion and all kinds of different bamboo.

River viewing pavillion.

Better yet, we went to the Green Ram Daoist temple, which Suyin describes in her book. If I hadn't read The Crippled Tree, I wouldn't have been too impressed, but I could picture what it was like in the early 1900s when her father was young and then later when she herself visited it.

Ram at the Green Ram temple.

You rub the ram's neck and whisper your wish in its ear, and then the ram is supposed make it come true. I won't tell what I wished for! (Actually, I don't really remember.)