Panda Adventures

It's a tradition for every CSB/SJU group that comes to Southwest University to throw a Halloween party. Of course, my group was no exception. Even though we had mid-term papers due the day after our party, we tried to plan the best one possible with the small funds we had. All of us split into various committees, including activities, music, decorations, and food, thinking that it would help keep things peaceful and organized, but of course we ended up bickering about all of it anyways.

Halloween is my favorite holiday. And I mean FAVORITE. It definitely tops Thanksgiving, Valentine's Day, and even Christmas. I love the trick-or-treating kids, making jack-o-lanterns, the orange Halloween oreos, scary movies, and dressing up with my friends. However, as this year's Halloween drew nearer and nearer, I wasn't as psyched for it. There would be no kids in costumes going around asking for candy, there are no pumpkins here (at least not the kind we have at home), oreos come in weird flavors like mango, berry, and green tea, I had no scary movies with me, and I had no idea how to find a costume in Beibei. On top of all that, we had to plan this party for all the International Student Office workers, the inhabitants of our dorm building, plus 200 other guests of our choosing. As we talked to other international students (from the U.S., Canada, and various parts of Europe) about coming to our party, they seemed uninterested in coming to our "lame" Halloween party.

The Chinese students, however, seemed very excited about our party. My language partner, Sally, was thrilled to be invited our Halloween party, and kept on reminding me how pleased she was. She told me that she had never been to an American Halloween party. She said that one time, when she was three years old, her mother was invited to a Christmas party, but since she was so young, she couldn't remember anything about it. She was worried that she didn't have anything to dress up as and wanted to help us with our preparations as much as possible. It was the excitement of Sally and other Chinese like her that kept me trying to make this the best Halloween party for them.

I was part of the decorations committee, and like I said before, I love carving jack-o-lanterns, so I wanted those to be part of our decorations. However, the Chinese pumpkins do not look like our pumpkins at all. Instead of being orange and stout, they are brownish-green, long, and skinny. We bought one just to see if it was possible to carve, and while the insides were exactly the same as what I was used to, it was impossible to get all the orange gunk and seeds out because our hands were too big to dig into the skinny pumpkins. So we gave up that idea and considered carving watermelons, but that seemed like a lot of work too. My friend Ronnie, from the Czech Republic, showed us another option. She found a small honey-dew like melon that had a orange-yellow color and even had a little stem for the jack-o-lantern's lid. They were perfect! So we bought a bunch of them, and got to carving. Since my language partner was so excited about Halloween, I invited her to carve the "pumpkins" with us. She thought long and hard about what to carve, and made one of the best scary faces! Here's a picture of my roommate Rachel and I carving, and all of our jack-o-lanterns...aren't they cool? The Jack Skellington face and the cat (3rd and 4th from the right) are mine, and the scary face second from the left is Sally's.

Then came the issue of costumes. Since Halloween is not celebrated here, stores don't just carry Halloween costumes. Rachel and I wanted to have costumes made, but we ended up waiting to long and it was impossible to have them on time. Then one of our Chinese friends brought us to a traditional dance costume shop, where we tried on all sorts of beautiful costumes, from Tibetan dresses, to Qing dynasty silk dresses, to belly-dancing outfits. And you know what was the only ones that fit us? The belly-dancing costumes. Awesome. I would've loved to have a pretty dress, but they were too short or my shoulders and hips would be too big. So I sucked it up (as well as my stomach) and we got the costumes.

Our party was a surprising success. There were tons of people there, including the other international students who said our party would be lame. They later admitted that they were wrong. We had tons of decorations even though we blew most of our decoration budget on pumpkin melons. Most of the decorations actually came from the toilet paper aisle as we felt the need to introduce the Chinese to the delicate art of TP-ing trees. Even though the food committee blew most of their budget on peanuts (what the heck??), there was tons of peanuts and candy to go around for all of our 250 plus guests. We had a costume contest, and the win was tied between two guys dressed up as very pretty girls. We had a bunch of games including bobbing for apples, pin the face on the pumpkin, and a mummy-wrapping contest (with more toilet paper, of course) and had prizes for the kids. My Chinese friends couldn't stop thanking me for the invitation and I got a lot of compliments on my costume (as well as a lot of concern because it was very cold). Everyone had a lot of fun and we were told that our party was 100 times better than last year's party. So even though initially I wasn't excited about my favorite holiday, it ended up being my best Halloween ever.
Here are the two beautiful winners of the costume contest

And some scary costumes

And some of my friends

And me!

On October 15, we took a trip to the Three Knife Gorge in Chongqing. I was pretty excited because I heard it had beautiful scenery, but I was not looking forward to waking up early on a Saturday morning to ride a bus for a couple hours.

At 8:30 we set off, and since I was one of the first on the bus, I decided to ride in the back seat of the bus. I was expecting our drive to be along a highway, but I was surprised to find that our drive was along a narrow, windy road through small villages and up the mountains. Not long into my bumpy ride in the back seat, I started to feel carsick. Now, it's been a long time since I've last gotten carsick; it hasn't happened since I was a little girl. I didn't want to admit it to the others in the bus, but I seriously felt like throwing up. I felt so relieved when my friend sitting next to me said that she wasn't feeling well either. Apparently, I turned very pale because our guide took one look at me and told me to sit in the front, so me and my sick friend relocated, but it did not help. Others in the bus started to feel sick too, and our driver stopped the bus outside of a small village where we got off the bus and got some fresh air. Some of the boys vomited there, and one of our guides, all the while about half the village came to watch us foreigners. Not one of our best moments as representatives of America. Our professor got plastic baggies for all of us because we had to continue on the twisty-turny bus ride. Good thing I had one too, because I did end up being sick on the bus. Sorry, most of you probably don't want to be hearing about me getting sick all the time, but it seems like I've been getting sick a lot lately here, and it really becomes a big part of my day. I guess it's just another pleasant part of my experience in China.

We made another stop at a small village, where we got to walk around for a bit. There was a Buddhist temple there, which made me excited because my research in China is about Buddhist practices in modern China. There, we saw people burning incense and bowing at the shrine. Seeing the visit as an opportunity to gain some information for my mid-term research paper, I began asking our guide about it, and my excitement quickly disappeared. He told me that most of the people visiting the temple weren't actually there for religious reasons, they were mostly there for luck. Burning incense and bowing in front of the Buddha are practiced to guarantee a happier year, a more successful business, or a happier love life. I asked my guide what he thought about a statistic that I found that said that 22% of the Chinese consider themselves practicing Buddhists. He shook his head and told me that the number was much lower. He estimated the percentage to be closer to 5%. I was pretty disheartened hearing this, since the topic is my research for the semester. A 5% population seemed impossible to find for interviews, especially since I knew that, as with all religions, the majority of followers are older. In China I can usually only talk with young people who are learning English since toddler-hood. The visit to the temple had me feeling pretty discouraged about my research, until I decided that the lack of religion is interesting in itself and that it would become part of my research. So, its all good!

After our visit to the village, we continued on the bus on what was the most twisty part of the ride yet, resulting in one of my guides getting sick right in front of me. However, the ride was short and we soon arrived at the top of the mountains overlooking the Chinese countryside. The air was crisper there and helped us all feel better after the sickening bus ride. Next to where we got off, there was a small dirty puppy wandering around, and while I usually avoid touching the dogs in China, this one was so friendly and excited to see us that many of us, including me, could not help ourselves. When I was done playing with the puppy, I grabbed a big glob of hand sanitizer and began the hike feeling much happier.

There are two ways through the gorge: you can start at the top of the mountain and hike down to the bottom, or you can start at the bottom and climb your way up to the top. Thankfully, we chose the former option. I don't think many people do choose the other option, because as we went down I did not pass one person climbing up in the opposite direction. The path has more than 1,000 stairs, which I was thankful that we didn't have to go up, but even going down made most of the people in my group get shaky legs. There are tons of people who stood along the path with these chair type things and they would carry people down the stairs, for a price of course. Many of these people were older married couples who probably had no other way of making money. I couldn't stand the idea of someone carrying my lazy butt down a mountain, but several people in my group had no problem with it. They were, after all, giving these Chinese people business. At first I felt bad for these people, but that pity soon turned into annoyance because they kept on stepping in front of me on the stairs and shouting their offering prices for the ride down. Ugh. So I either could refuse their offers and not give these poor old couples any business, or accept the ride to give them business and feel awful that some old people are literally carrying a physically able person down a mountain. I did not accept any rides, but they made me feel bad no matter what I did.

The gorge itself was as beautiful as I had been told. Starting at the top of the mountain, we could see much of the surrounding green mountains and valleys. As we walked down, we were surrounded by bamboo, waterfalls, and crystal clear streams and pools. The water reminded me of what I expected to find in Jiuzhaigou during National Holiday, and since that trip did not work out, I was very excited to find similar landscape in the gorge. There were caves and rocks that hung down from the cliffs like daggers. I saw praying mantises, snakes, even monkeys. I was amazed to see the monkeys out in the wild, where they scampered up and down the cliffs with ease. They made me a little nervous as well, because I had never seen anything like them outside of a zoo. If these wild animals wanted to run up to me and bite my hand off, they very well could do that. Actually, shortly after the small group that I was with left the monkeys, we heard screams from behind us. Turns out, another small group of my classmates were back there and the alpha monkey came chasing after them. Nobody got bit, but wild animals, even cute little monkeys are not to be messed with!

After we reached the end of the gorge about three hours after we started down the mountain, we all climbed onto the bus to take us back. I expected another crazy ride that would make us all carsick, but actually every single one of us passed out within fifteen minutes of leaving. We all basically slept the whole way back, which went much faster since we didn't have to make any stops. We got back to the dorms and climbed into bed right away, exhausted from our long day.

One of our days in Chengdu, our Chengdu guides Ann and Evan took us to the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding. I was so excited for this day, but when the day came, I was feeling really sick. I have no idea why, but we had hotpot the night before and I don't know? Maybe the Chengdu food got to me. Anyway, I refused to let that get in the way of my panda visit - they are, after all, what I named this blog for. The chance to see them might be a one-time occurrence. So, I dragged myself to get some lunch (which did not stay down) and across town in a taxi ride that I could only wish to be shorter. We got to the bus station and I was sitting there wondering if I was really in the condition to go anywhere, I really did feel terrible. As we were walking towards the bus, I had one more case of the upchucks (super embarrassing) but ahh! Like magic, I felt 180 degree, complete turn-around, totally great and ready to see pandas! Just in time too because the bus we took was much longer than expected and very bumpy (which still made my stomach jump a little).

My Chengdu group, with our guides Ann and Evan on the far right and our panda guide, Pansy, next to me on the left

We got to the Research Base and were greeted by two ginormous statues of pandas, but no actual pandas. The reserve is built into a large expanse of bamboo forest, which was absolutely beautiful, but it felt like we were walking through a giant corn maze as we wove our way on the paths to the panda exhibit. The signs to the exhibits were misleading, and just when I felt like we were walking in circles I looked up and saw a panda taking a nap in the tree right in front of the group! I went a little camera crazy with the first panda, who actually had his back turned to us and was partially hidden by the tree branches, so I have many pictures of that fuzzy, black and white back. We went on to find many more pandas that were a lot more lively than the one in the tree. It was dinner time when we got there, so we saw the pandas at their liveliest, waddling around slowly and munching on bamboo. Did you know that even though there are hundreds of species of bamboo, pandas only eat one specific kind? That certain species of bamboo only grows in Sichuan province in China, so pandas can only be found in this one part of China in the wild. I thought that was so amazing that such a unique species could only be found in such a small corner of China.

We went to the nursery where we found a big crib full of panda cubs. They were about 4 months old and were so adorable. We could only look at them through a window, though, but I tried my best to get a good photo of them. Sadly, the glass made my attempts blurry. There was a veterinarian in the nursery with them, checking each one of them on a regular basis. In the wild, there are not very many pandas in one given area, so whatever breeding that does happen in the wild tends to be within related pandas. The panda cubs born out of those pairings often don't live very long because of the overlapping genes. For a while, the giant panda's population started to drop so fast that research bases like the one in Chengdu were started in order to conserve the beloved and unique species. The scientists and veterinarians make sure the genetics of the parenting pandas do not overlap so that the cubs have a greater chance of survival. More and more pandas are being reintroduced into the wild every year and their population is steadily growing.

There aren't only giant pandas in the Research Base. There are also red pandas that live and are bred there. How the two species are related is beyond me. One is big, black and white, and has a short tail, while the other is about the size of a cat, reddish-brown, and has a long bushy tail. Red pandas sort of look like raccoons because of the mask-like design on their faces and bushy, striped tail. The Chinese word for panda is "xiong mao" which translates into English as "bear cat." While I can see the small red panda as maybe being a distant relative to a cat, I was surprised when our tour guide called the giant panda a cat as well. I distinctly remembered reading that the giant panda is, in fact, a bear, but when I started to argue it made no difference to my guide. In China, pandas are cats. There was actually a sign at the Research Base with all the world's big cats, and next to the tiger was a panda. Doesn't make sense to me, but it's just another difference that I have to get used to in this country.

Right before the Base was scheduled to close, our group decided to take one last hike to see the giant pandas again. We came to the area that had the juvenile pandas. For a while they weren't doing much, but as more and more people left the park, they became much more active. They started playing with each other and rolling around the area. It seemed like the less people there were watching them, the more they felt comfortable just being playful teenager pandas. After about 15 minutes of tumbling around, their caretaker yelled for them and they all ran off, although it was probably just more of a fast waddle. Our time watching those pandas play was such a great end to the day and we all left with huge smiles on our faces. One of the boys in my group had a great camera and got a fantastic video of it, including their run at the end. I, however, brought the worst camera possible, but did my best to capture some of the playtime. For whatever reason, I can't upload the video onto this blog, but I'll try to show people when I get home!

I just got back from my National Holiday trip a couple days ago. I had a lot of fun, but none of that trip went how we wanted and it did get pretty stressful at times. I traveled with a small group of 5 other students from St. Ben's/ St. John's; my roommate and I were the only girls, but after the trip we felt like a 4 older brothers.

On Saturday, Oct. 1st, we all woke up early to meet in our dorm lobby at 6:45 AM. We had to walk a ways to find a taxi to take us to the train station. With a group of six, we decided to split up to take two taxis, which scared me because I was in charge of one taxi. I had looked up how to say "Chongqing North Train Station" in Mandarin, but the driver didn't understand me so I showed him my train ticket. He seemed to understand and continued to say something in Chinese. I had no idea what he was saying, and I figured since I murdered the name of the train station he would know I wouldn't understand him. I could only nod and say "Dui!" ("ok!") and point to the other taxi which was taking the other half of our group away. So we headed off. Our driver was driving like a maniac, speeding, swerving, and occasionally slamming on the brakes to avoid collisions with other vehicles. I took my mind off of his driving by concentrating on the scenery around us. It was another rainy day in Chongqing, and it made the surrounding mountains look really misty and beautiful. After about 40 minutes, we arrived at the train station. Phew! I was so relieved that he actually understood where we wanted to go. We tried to pay him 80 yuan, a pretty fair amount for a 40 minute taxi ride, but he started arguing that he needed 120. That would be 40 yuan per person, and we were told not to go more than 20 per person, and the three of us were actually going above that by offering 80. He yelled at us for some time, until we put the 80 in his hands and ran out of the cab to the station. That's how things go here.

Our train ride was pretty uneventful, except there was some flooding along the tracks, which extended our 4 hour train ride to 6 hours. We were lucky to have a sleeper train, so we spent some of that time sleeping, and the rest just hanging out and talking. I shared a cabin with two of the boys from my group, a Chinese woman, and her young son. The boy was four years old and was already talking to us in English and to his mother in Chinese. He had two large books, one in each language, out of which he spent time studying. The children here are really impressive. Even by the age of two, most children in the cities here are speaking in both English and Chinese.

We arrived in Chengdu and met our guides for the night, Ann and Evan. Ann is the sister of a student at St. John's University that knows many of the boys that I traveled with. Ann reserved hotel rooms for us for the night, which was good because we were sort of planning on just sleeping in a KFC since most places were already booked for National Holiday. She and her boyfriend, Evan, helped us purchase tickets back to Chongqing on the 7th, so everything was going great - we had a hotel and tickets home. However, after some asking around, Ann had to tell us that there were no available buses to Jiuzhaigou, so we had to cancel that trip and stay in Chengdu. Although I really wanted to see the scenery of Jiuzhaigou, getting stuck in Chengdu didn't seem that terrible because I had heard lots of wonderful things about the city.

Chengdu is actually the #1 fastest growing city in the world (Chongqing is #3), and amid the skyscraper apartment buildings and multi-story shopping malls you can find a lot of Western influence. Our first dinner in Chengdu was actually at Papa John's, and we were all surprised how fancy and expensive it was. Our three large pizzas ended up costing 383 yuan (about $60), but they were so delicious and satisfied our pizza cravings for a while. The same night, Evan and Ann took us to a Western-style bar/club, which cost each of us 100 yuan ($15) to get in. It was nice, but I prefer places where we get in for free. It was an expensive first night by China standards, but it was fun.

Once we were heading to the hotel, I realized that my bag smelled a lot like my shampoo. I unzipped it and reached in and found out that, sure enough, my shampoo bottle opened and Herbal Essences were all over my belongings. At the hotel, I took everything out to see the damage. A lot of my clothes, my towel, my shoes, my notebook, and money were all soaked in that blue shampoo goo. Awesome. On the bright side, it all smelled nice. I did my best to rinse everything out in my hotel sink, but I had to throw away my white shirt that was stained from the shampoo. Awesome again. Next time, I'm putting the shampoo in a plastic bag. Here's a pic of everything that was soaked with shampoo!

The next couple days we really didn't do a whole lot. Since we were staying in Chengdu the whole week, we booked our hotel rooms for the rest of our stay. The hotel was very nice and had hot water all day long (which we don't have in our dorms)! We explored food places and the local nightlife, went shopping, caught up on sleep, and basically just relaxed. It was like Spring Break. Evan and Ann gave us ideas for where to go, and we would go to wherever they recommended. We got to see Jin Li, which is Chengdu's ancient town. It's actually very cool and we went at night when everything was lit with lanterns and lights, but it was so crowded because of National Holiday so we didn't spend much time there. One day we went to see pandas, which I will write about in much more detail in another post. Near our hotel, we found several great restaurants, one of which we went to nearly every day because of their amaaaaazing dumplings. We went to a great hotpot place with Evan and Ann one night, where the food was spicy, cheap, and soooo delicious. One night, we went to Evan's home where his mother made us a huge home-cooked dinner. Once we finished off a plate of something she would bring out more and more.....if it's starting to sound like all we did in Chengdu was eat, it's probably because that is what we spent a lot of our time doing! I swear I came back to Chongqing five pounds heavier just after that one week of delicious food.

Here's a picture of our favorite dumpling place. This couple was so nice!

At the end of the week on Friday, we went to the train station to go back to Chongqing. However, when we got to our gate, there was a problem with our tickets registering in the system. A woman took one look at them and told us that they were for a train on the day before! We were stunned. When we bought the tickets home, the man selling them told us they were for Friday the 7th. None of us had noticed the date printed on our tickets, or even thought to look.We had no idea what to do, so we called Evan. He rushed over to the train station and tried to get us on the train that we planned on boarding. When we were told there was no way to board the train, we all felt crushed. We were sure there would be no more trains to Chongqing that night, and if we stayed another night in Chengdu, where would we go? We had classes the next morning that we assumed we would miss. We went to the ticket office, and Evan actually found tickets for us that night. However, we would be standing on the 4-hour train because there were no more seats available. We decided that was better than nothing, so we bought the tickets. Evan waited with us at the train station, and a couple hours later we said goodbye and boarded our train.

The train home was crowded and uncomfortable. Being the only Westerners on the train, we were stared at and had our pictures taken by many Chinese sitting comfortably in their seats. Since we were standing, that only made us even more visible to all who were curious. Most days, I don't mind people looking at me here, but on the train I was tired and didn't want the attention. However, one of our friends, another international student from Southwest University, actually had a seat in the same car as us, so I passed a lot of the time with her talking and sitting in her seat when my feet got too tired (although I tried to do that as little as possible). Four long hours later, we arrived in Chongqing.

Here's a picture of some of the boys standing on the train.

Tired, we found taxis and rode home. We got back to Beibei around 11 PM, but since we had no dinner yet that night we decided to make our first stop at a noodle place that we all love. The taxi driver actually drove us right up to the Noodle Man's stand. Seeing all of us pile out of the taxi with our luggage made the owner so excited, he kept on offering us cigarettes as gifts (which is used as a nice gift here, but we rejected) and saying "I like you guys!" It was a good end to our long day.

It's very common here in China to have another name. For the Chinese, they often have an English name that they pick out. For others, they might have a Chinese name. It's very difficult for the Chinese to remember names if they aren't Chinese, so if you're here for an extended period of time, it's highly recommended that you have a Chinese name.

When we started our semester in Beijing, our Chinese teacher gave us names that would satisfy the need for Chinese sounds and characters while still sounding like our American names. My name became , 瑞塔, pronounced like "ray-ta." I asked the teacher if the characters had any meaning to them and the first character was just a name sound, so no meaning, and the second character meant "tower" or "pagoda." This name was fine for a while, until I realized that when I said my Chinese name to the Chinese people, they always gave me weird looks. I knew it didn't sound Chinese, but it turns out it just really isn't a Chinese name. So, I was not satisfied with my name.

Then I began classes at SWU. I pretty much go by my American name here, except when people ask if I have a Chinese name. Then of course they tell me that it's not a real Chinese name. In our Chinese class, our teacher gave us new Chinese names the first week or so being here. The one she gave me is 赛瑞塔, which is pronounced "sai-ray-ta." Again, not a real Chinese name. I asked my teacher what the characters mean, she said the first means "competition," the second means "good luck," and the last means "tower" again. Now I didn't like my name for two reasons: it isn't a real Chinese name and "competition good luck tower" does not make sense at all. Last week, when we were learning introductions in Chinese, our teacher decided to give us Chinese last names as well, because "wo xing (my surname is) Tabor" does not sound very good. My Chinese surname is now 邰, pronounced "tai," which has no meaning and is just a family name here, but not a very common one. Apparently though, there is a Taiwanese singer whose surname is Tai so that's how my teacher came up with it. Listening to all of us say our Chinese names, which probably sounded ridiculous, our teacher decided to give us the assignment of finding our own Chinese names. Hurray! Finally I could get a real Chinese name! I looked for a long time online searching for words I liked, but could not decide on one.

On Tuesday night my roommate and I got together for dinner with a Chinese girl that we met a couple weeks ago, Sally, and her friend, Wringley. After our dinner, we sat around and talked for a long time and Wringley eventually said that she didn't like her English name, which she picked out. Some of the names that the Chinese pick for themselves sound funny to us English-speakers, but they don't know what makes a good name in English. I've met people named James Bond, Scotfeld, Rainbow, Koala, and Motion. Anyway, I don't know why Wringley picked that name, but she asked us to give her a new English name. In turn, we asked for Wringley and Sally to give us Chinese names. We all thought very hard about names, considering length, sounds, and meanings. Rachel and I came up with Anna, Jenny, Lizzie, Abby, and more short names that would be easy to remember and to spell. Sally and Wringley quickly came up with a Chinese name for Rachel, a two-character name that meant "nobel" and "lotus," then they struggled with coming up with one for me. They thought long and hard until about half an hour later they gave me 晓伊, pronounced "xiao yi." The first character means a ray of light that gives hope, and the second character comes from an old Chinese story and was used to describe a woman who was kind, honest, and virtuous. So...finally! I have my own Chinese name! And at the end of the night, Wringley chose the name Jenny, which I think suits her. Everybody has new names!

邰晓伊