Working on this album made me realize that we've now lived in China for over a year, and have only visited three cities outside of Shanghai - Suzhou, Beijing, and Chengdu - I guess we should start traveling more around China! Out of the three cities we've seen, I would say that Chengdu is my favorite. Chengdu is located in Sichuan province and is home to not only delicious Sichuan food, but China's very sacred pandas!!! I've always thought that cartoon pandas (think Kung Fu Panda) were cute, but had been a bit skeptical that I'd think real ones were too. Boy was I wrong! Giant Pandas are adorable, and who knew red pandas existed?!?
Here are some of the highlights from our trip that we took back in August:
We stayed in downtown Chengdu, which had a nice riverfront area as well as parks that were really relaxing to walk through.
Nate and I love spicy food, so Sichuan food is our favorite kind of Chinese food to eat. We eat Sichuan food at least twice a week here, but having it in the province that it's from really gave us an idea of how complex this style of cooking can be. Normally when you eat Sichuan food there's a lot of red chili peppers, tons of heat, and if green peppercorn is in the dish it creates a very numbing (麻辣 mala) feeling, sometimes too numbing. When we ate our favorite dishes in Chengdu, everything was balanced. The heat, the numbing feeling from the peppercorn, and the spices -- all worked together to make the flavors of the dishes come out without the heat or the numbness overpowering the flavors. Yummy!
Now for the highlight of the weekend...the panda sanctuary! Although we went on a weekend day, and it was a bit crowded up front while we were getting our tickets, once we were inside it was actually very quiet and relaxing. The grounds are kept very nicely landscaped, and other than a few areas where the main Giant Panda was living, or the smallest baby panda was, we could move around easily throughout the rest of the park. I know that everyone goes there to see the Giant Panda, but my personal favorite was actually the way smaller red panda!
To see our full photo album from Chengdu click here, and to see more photos that are not in the album but in Nate's travel photo section click here!
We had a great time in Chengdu and maybe after we see a few new places in China will return to Chengdu to do what we love to do best - eat!
~ Trisha and Nate