Sunday, March 27, 2011

Arrival In Chengdu

We all got up early yesterday to catch the bus up to Nanjing for our next flights.


Yangtze River on the Way to Nanjing

The Clements family and us were headed to Chengdu while the rest of the families were going back to Beijing to flights back home.  It was sad good-byes with promises to keep in touch and exchange pictures, etc.
Our flight to Chengdu was delayed due to fog so we ended up sitting in the airport waiting for about 3 more hours before finally taking off.  It is about a 2.5 hour flight  so we were all pretty tired when we arrived.  Our guide, Sylvia, was there to greet us.  We did not have enough time to go to the Hotel before our dinner reservations so we headed directly to the restaurant.  We had our own private room and were a bit disappointed that Sylvia did not join us.  The food was much more like the Chinese food we were used to at home so that plus the relatively quiet and smoke free meal was an enjoyable change for all of us.  After the meal we rushed off to the Chinese Opera House.  We are near the center of the city and we were all impressed with how modern and interesting the streets and alley ways were.  Dave commented that it would have been much more fun roaming around these streets rather than sitting in the airport but, at least we made it.

We arrived at the Opera house and were a bit concerned that it was an open air theater and the weather was windy and cool.  That combined with the fact that we were all very tired and did not have all our heavy coats made me think it was going to be too cold.  I was able to grab the last guest robe though for Ali to wrap up in and I had my down vest in my backpack so we stayed relatively comfortable during the show.  It was a great show with Chinese Dancing instruments, acts, and face changing.  We all enjoyed it and were impressed.




We arrived to our Hotel around 10:00 all very tired.  Our rooms are in central Chengdu (a city of over 11 million people) on the 16th floor.  We have a beautiful view of the city.  We all went to sleep very quickly but we are looking forward to visiting the Pandas today.

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