Well, I mean that’s what everyone things. Spicy food. Pandas. Earthy people. Pandas. Earthquake. Pandas. Hot Pot. Pandas. Flower Peppers. Pandas.
I was in Chengdu over the weekend for a work project, but I was lucky enough to have a day off to go off and visit the Chengdu Giant Panda Research and Breeding Base.
Pandas turned out to be really awesome – especially in a place like the Research Base since you could get pretty close in their enclosures. I came really close to snatching a little Chinese kid’s water gun because he kept squirting the pandas.
Pandas, its turns out, like sleeping
And eating
And sleeping
And sleeping
And eating
They also had the only very slightly related red pandas there. Red pandas were a lot more active and vocal than the giant pandas. We witnessed a 3 way fight between three of them, which included them scampering all over the viewing platforms.
Red panda
He’s coming right for us!
Back to giant pandas, sleeping
Socialable pandas
Feeding time
So, if you’ve ever had friends that have visited Chengdu and one of the two panda facilities, you’ve probably seen them wearing a surgery apron and hugging a panda. I knew that I had to pay about 1000 RMB (it ended up being 1300 RMB) what I didn’t know was that you had to pay cash – good thing that I had 1427 RMB in my wallet at the time, because I got to do this:
Of course Chengdu wasn’t ALL pandas. I did some eating (and work) too. Those I’ll share in my next blog post.
We were there too but did not want to pay US$200 just to have photos taken with a panda.
Our cousin paid 1,000 baht (or more, can’t remember?) to hold a tiger cub in Chiang Mai.
@Dad – for one person its a lot more palatable. For more than one it adds up in a hurry.
@Celia – 1000 baht is like 30 bucks. 1200 RMB is like 200 bucks.