Panda-monium, Farewell Chengdu

Our last full day in Chengdu certainly was a full one. Let me start by saying what wonderful hosts the folks at Chengdu Experimental Foreign Languages School are.
They have really taken us in and shown us the sights. Today we headed north toward the mountains to the town of Dujiangyan to see a 2100 year old irrigation project. Now that may not sound too exciting but just consider the technology available two millenia ago. This system was designed to provide water to all of the Chengdu basin, and it is still functioning today. Li Bing was the architect and he is still revered for his ingenuity, and for good reason. The system works entirely based on built in controls that allow just the right amount of water to flow to Chengdu, wet or dry season. I would go into all the details, which I found fascinating, but my guess is most of you would doze off before I finished. Suffice it to say that we were all once again impressed with the innovation and creative thinking of the Chinese. Still in Dujiangyan we headed to lunch. The kids have been here long enough to have developed favorite foods, and today's menu of choice was dumplings. All were devoured in short order and then it was back on the road.

The afternoon was spent at the Chengdu Giant Panda Breeding Center. This is where most of the Pandas in zoos around the world come from. With their natural habitat disappearing, and their naturally low reproductive rate, there are only about a thousand Pandas left in the wild. This center is set up to preserve the species, and provide a firsthand look at the life of the Panda. Panda's spend most of their day eating bamboo and sleeping. Once a year they take time out of this demanding schedule to reproduce, if they can find a mate, and then it is back to eating and sleeping. At our first glimpse of a Giant Panda their was a flurry of "cool" and "ahs" and "they are so cute." And that was the boys speaking.
Our kids couldn't get enough, with visits to see adults, juveniles,who were much more active than the adults, and 6 month old youngsters, who had the same teetering awkwardness of young humans. Our stay at the Panda Center was much like our stay overall, much too short and leaving us wanting more.

From the Pandas it was back to Chengdu for a final dinner. We each received yet another gift from our gracious hosts, along with an exceptional dinner. We can't possibly express the gratitude we feel, but we would all like to say "Xiexie, zaijian, hou hui you qi." My Mandarin is still pretty rough but hopefully that means "Thank you, goodbye, hope to see you again." That is certainly how we all feel. Farewell Chengdu.

Tom Whittington