Panda Park

My host sister, Lily, in front of baby pandas.

Today my host family took me to the Chengdu Panda Reserve.  It is this huge, beautiful, lush park with about 20 giant pandas and red pandas.

In the afternoon, Lily and I went to a massive underground market for cheap shopping.  I loved bargaining as I hunted for unique souvenirs.  My host sister was not nearly as driven of a bargainer as I was, but I think the vendors automatically notched up the price just because she was standing next to me.  Besides all of the shoes stopping at a size I grew out of in elementary school, at least an inch of height is added to the bottom of each.  Converse must have to special-make Chinese Chucks.  A lot of the clothes are of a really strange style; I cannot tell if their fashion is ahead of or behind ours, but hipster has definitely not struck yet.  I have already tired of the clothes I brought with me, but then I realized that my host sister only has five outfits...

Contacts to change iris' color or size.

I recently figured out why it is so hard to understand my host family's Chinese; they speak a dialect of Mandarin called Sichuanese that varies from Standard on a few vocabulary and pronunciation points.  For example, 吃饭 (chi fan meaning eat) and 睡觉 (shui jiao meaning sleep), two rather important words, are pronounced ci fan and sui jiao.

Weirdest thing I ate today: duck's tongue (like beef jerky with more tendons).  Although that was kind of a low, I had some really delicious things too, such as kumquat chrysanthemum juice with jackfruit (pictured below) and a dinner roll filled with red bean paste.  A few days ago I had Beijing roast duck, and it was so tasty.  For foods classified as highly-suspicious (often soups), I have developed a tactic where if I pick up something whose protein source is dubious I can let it slip and blame it on my still-developing chopstick skills.