I'm thinking I should have put "some lunch" in tiny letters here….so I wouldn't mind at all if you're not interested in Pandas, if you came back another day……but otherwise……
Even though the San Diego Zoo has had a long love affair with Pandas, the one place on my list for Chengdu was the "Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding", whew, that's a mouthful. I'm not quite sure why….but I really wanted to check the place out. And apparently, so did a host of other folks….
The base itself is a bit over 200 acres…making it quite large. There are different trails to take, a large lake, a museum, panda food processing center, etc, etc…….
But of course, we were here to see pandas….. so we headed off, past the ponds….
We thought we saw something as we turned a corner……
But no, these were Red Pandas…cute in their own sense, but nothing like the giant pandas we wanted a glimpse of.
In my reading I found that red pandas belong to the family musteloidea, more closely related to weasels and skunks than the giant panda.
As we meandered along the trails, past the empty nursery (it was not quite the season for little ones), I was prepared for not really seeing a giant panda….which wouldn't have been such a bad thing as I could always go to the San Diego Zoo to see them. Then as we walked down one of the trails we saw this…..(feel free to click on the photos to enlarge)
Laying down, lazily munching on some bamboo……
Suddenly the Panda decided to sit up…….possibly recalling that mom always said never to eat lying down…"you might choke on something!"
All the while having a firm grip on bamboo….never missing a beat, all done in a leisurely fashion.
Only to decide that supine was only way to eat………I'm sure this one approved of breakfast in bed.
As we walked pass the pandas, the Missus was totally gaga over them, it made me wonder…..
What made pandas so cute….was it the head to body proportion? Or perhaps the white and black color and the black around the eyes that made them look larger? Or perhaps the somewhat ambling movement that made the panda seem to be eternally dawdling?
For some reason, I really enjoyed watching them grasp their food, in an almost human way……I guess I could really relate to that. I recall seeing something on one of those channels once, about how the pleasure center of the brain got going after just a brief glimpse of something "cute"…..
Heck maybe fellow blogger Lynnea can tell me why………..
Because in the end……
I decided that knowing the why's would take all the fun out of it…….it was better just to forget about it and enjoy……
Which is what we did at the Giant Panda Breeding Research Base.
It was a bit past normal lunchtime when we left the Panda Center and the Missus' cousin here was really not food-centric…so we could really understand the effort he had put in during the past two days…heck, we'd be bushed too. So we didn't blame him at all for choosing one of the tourist type restaurants right across the street from the Panda Breeding Center for lunch.
And the food, unlike many tourist centric restaurants in other countries (including our own) wasn't too bad.
Here's another item that folks living in the Western world sometimes find strange…remember, cucumber is a gourd and it is treated as such….
Remember my $1 cucumber recipe or Zi Su Jian Huang Gua?
Some of the dishes seemed to be part of the parade of Sichuan's greatest hits……
Though that Mapo Doufu wasn't bad at all…….
Needless to say we didn't leave hungry. It was onward to our next stop Wenshu Temple.
Thanks for reading!