Day 20-23, Chengdu city

To reach Chengdu city we decided to take a bus with sleeping places which takes 23 hours to reach Chengdu from Lijiang. At first bus seemed to be really great, you could lay all the way to Chengdu, but this turned to be extremely exhausting! In Chinese sleeping buses there are 3 rows of 2-stored beds and no sitting places.

Our visit of the city started from visiting Wuhou temple, it was just on the opposite side of the road of our hotel.




























There we saw some statues of famous Chinese worriers from the Three Kingdoms period (221 - 589). Statues weren't made during that period, but several centuries later.






































King Kong in the Wuhou garden














Girls with beautiful dresses making performance.















There a full corridor of colorful pictures on the wall, each picture was representing a some part of Chinese famous legend or a fairy tail. I didn't get what the legend was about but I liked the pictures a lot!
























Chengdu is famous for it's Giant Panda's Breeding Center, where you can see many pandas, if you are lucky. This is because most of the time pandas are asleep. So the best time to see pandas is during the feeding time.
This is the place where little cute pandas are fed.

































In a hot afternoon panda is refreshing herself in the water














Now I have a picture with panda!














Beautiful swan lake














In one of the evening we went to Chinese opera.














The opera supposed to take place in a tea house, meaning that during performance they serve you tee all the time. It was really a good idea to arrive 30 minutes before the opera was supposed to start, we could watch actors doing makeups and also to take pictures for free.










































Chinese opera appeared to be completely different than we thought of! Chinese opera performance includes not only singing, but also different types of activities.
A little video from the opera

Puppet show

Then we saw a shade show where an actor was making different figurs using only his hands.














Then we saw a show with people changing their costums and masks extremely quickly. The actors were changing their masks so fast that no matter how carefully you look you won't undernstand how they do it!














Next to our hotel there was a nice street with many western type bars and restaurants. This street was so beautiful and cozy that we spent all the evenings there. There was also a small pond with Chinese-type little houses around. An interesting observation, while in bars all non-Chinese people were drinking Chinese beer, and opposite, Chinese were drinking only western beer.




























In Chengdu there is an interesning pagoda called 1000-Buddhas pagoda. If you take a closer look you will see many Buddhas all over the pagoda.






































Close to that place there was a Buddhist temple, when we were passing by we heard very unusual sounds coming from it. When we came closer we saw many Buddhist monks involved into some kind praying (or maybe meditating) ceremony. It was very impressive, I came closer to take a picture, but all I got on is a Buddhist monk running towards me and forbidding to take any pictures :(



















Not only in Chengdu, but also in other places we've been in China we noticed very strange custom. During lunchtime, all the staff of the restaurants goes out and stands in line in front of their restaurant with the manager standing in front of them and loudly trying to explain something. All the staff quietly listens to the manager and after he is done, they go back to their works. Just like that...