With many tears I separated from my new British friends and headed down to Chengdu. On the train it turns out that I was next to the only other white person on the train a woman named Rebecca from Rocklin NY. We had a nice long chat about her boyfriend in Chengdu and if they were going to stay together and so on. He'd been teaching in China for a year while she was in the states so she was concerned they'd gone off in two different directions. I offered my sage advice,"Yeah, relationships are hard." and let it go at that.

Showed up in Chengdu yesterday at 5 in the morning and was fairly burnt out so didn't do too much. I did take a walk downtown where I saw snake meat for the first time (it was in the shape of a snake. That's how I knew) and at the end of the market I turned right and saw some military guys in front of a gate. So, I looked up and it said "Military Area" so I thought, "oh, can't go that way." and took out my map upon which one of the military guys comes running out yelling and pointing very vigorously for me to get away. Which I did and and as I was I noticed that there were three more military guys running up behind him and toward me. So that was kind of unnerving. I walked away without incident however. I would hope that if I was mapping military installations I would be a little more discreet and go around the corner or something.

Let's talk Pandas. Holy shit are they cute. Yes, as good as advertised. I took a trip up to the panda center where who did I run into but Kate and Caroline! "Jack Bauer!" they yelled. We caught up a little but they were on a different tour so I lost track of them. I forgot to bring my camera into the panda sanctuary. However, I got promises of emailed photos of the ones that Kate and Caroline took so thank you to them. Anyway, big pandas or small, they are all adorable and really at times do look like humans in panda suits. Even the red pandas, who kind of get the short end of the stick in the panda world, were really cute. We watched a movie about how the pandas mate and the artificial insemination. They showed footage of a panda giving birth and the thing just squirted out and the panda looked fucking terrified. And about three seconds later a scientist runs in the cage and gets the baby to put in a controlled environment. One of the women I was on the tour with said "Oh, that's so sad that they take it away like that!" but then the next footage was of a new mother playing with the newborn like a cat with a mouse until the scientists, who were very obviously flipping out, came in to get it.

The best sign at the sanctuary said: "I am the national treasure and I hate noise".