Wednesday, October 18, 2006

Jeanette Can Do Chengdu!

We returned late from Beijing and spent the next day recuperating from our travels in Beijing. We attend the CIWC luncheon, so that Jeanette could meet some of my friends and then we spent the rest of our time chillin' out.

In the evening I introduced Jeanette to our massages ladies that come to our house for a whole 30 rmb an hour (which is a whole $3.75 an hour). Basically that sent the tone for the rest of Jeanette's trip. We were going to see how many massages we could have before she went home.

The next day we attended a yoga class given by my friend Natasha. I have never been a fan of yoga, I think mainly because of my personality, but also because I have never felt the benefit of yoga. Natasha is the first instructor to make me sweat, sore and feel the benefit of yoga. Jeanette is also a yoga instructor back in the U.S. and wanted to get a little exercise it and also check out Natasha's teaching style.

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After yoga and miss Gemma arriving home from school Jeannette, the kids and I headed to the Chengdu Panda Research Reserve. This is one of the places you read about in world news when there is a baby panda born in China or a panda at a zoo in the U.S., they are most likely from Chengdu. We walked and walked and walked the beautiful bamboo park in search of these mysterious creatures to the point where I was a little nervous thinking Jeanette had come all this way to see pandas and they were all sleeping or not on display for some reason or another. Luckily we persevered because we were able to see quite a few of them during feeding time.

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Loving his bamboo!

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Loving the pandas!

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We found these 3 teenage pandas eating. We were so close to them it was incredible!

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We saw the 6 baby pandas in the nursery, but we were unable to take pictures of them. Four of the babies were two sets of twin born from two sister pandas. These babies made world news was I was back in the U.S. this summer, so it was very cool to see them up close although they were behind class.

pandas

The other cool thing that you will probably start seeing the near future are these 5 creatures (click on the link, the article is very interesting) that are the mascots for the Beijing 2008 Olympics. They are actually pandas from the research base and their names are: Bei Jing Huan Ying Ni. These words in Chinese actually mean "Welcome to Beijing", pretty cool huh?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Those are great pictures of Panda's and all of you. I miss you guys so much. Very cool to see the mascots for the Olympics.

Anonymous said...

Those panda's are so cute! I would love to take the kids to see them. I wish massage prices were the same here, I think I would get a massage every few days.

Actions and Consequences said...

Are the panda's showing off more than you expected to see?