Chengdu & Shanghai, China

January 1-16, 2013

Map

Ying and I spent four days at home after our trip to The Yucatan Peninsula before heading off again to China.  We left on January 1^st flying through Beijing and arrived in Chengdu, Sichuan Province around 11:00 PM.  By the time we collected our luggage and took a taxi to the Shangri-La Hotel it was after midnight.

The first part of our trip is business.  Ying has started a travel consultancy business to bring Chinese tourists to America.  Her Chinese partner, Ben Lee, has lined up two days of meetings with various potential clients.  Thursday morning we took a taxi over to The Sichuan Government Affairs Service Center where Ying’s partner had arranged a seminar for parents and students to learn about a summer camp program Ying has put together to send 12 year-olds to America this summer to learn English and see some of the interesting areas of California.  Roughly forty parents and students attended the two hour presentation, which resulted in seven students signing up to attend the camp.  We returned to our hotel at 5:00 PM so Ying could meet another friend who works for Pernod Ricard, the big international liquor importer who had helped to arrange our lodging at The Shangri-La.  We still had jet-lag so decided to order room service and go to sleep early.

Friday was a full day of meetings with a high official of the Chengdu Education Commission who rode with us to meet principals of two local middle-schools to further promote the summer camp program.  Our first stop was the Primary School (grades 1-6) attached to the Chengdu Normal School.  A half-dozen school officials awaited our arrival and gave us a tour of the 1,300-student school.  We viewed several rooms of excellent student artwork as well as a special room dedicated to the school’s response during the Sichuan Earthquake.  Ben Lee & Ying joined in as first graders danced to “Gangnam Style” in the courtyard.  The Principal, Ms. Liu, interrupted a meeting to greet us and take some photos.  Our second stop was The Modern Vocational & Technological School of Chengdu with an enrollment of about 1000.  This school concentrates on preparing students to enter the fields of Information Technology, Beauty, Music, Dance and several other fields.  We met Min Chen the Schoolmaster but I spent most of the time with the Vice Principal Bill who spoke English and was very proud of their school.  We went from classroom to classroom observing piano lessons, dance class and English instruction by an Australian teacher.

Ben took us to lunch at a very nice restaurant where he continued to tell us about himself.  Apparently, in addition to running this Boys & Girls after school program, he is also runs programs for senior and disabled citizens.  Although originally established as a NGO, he now receives support from the government.  CCTV, one of the main Chinese television stations has produced a program on his work and he has also been honored by Xi Jin Ping, the Chinese Premier.

After lunch, we went to a local community center where the senior community was preforming Peking Opera.  The show was stopped when we arrived so the foreign dignitaries could be introduced to the audience.  After the show, we were asked to come up on the stage for photos before leaving.

We stopped by Ben Lee’s office to sign the contract with Ying’s company and Ben’s organization and meet some of the other people who work in the Chengdu Government services office before returning to our hotel for the evening.  Saturday, Lily and Ben have offered to take us to the Giant Panda Breeding Center to see the pandas.

The Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding is in a northern suburb of Chengdu.  Lily and Ben picked us up after breakfast and we drove a half hour and finally located the facility.  Although Lily and Ben have been here before, the ongoing construction throughout Chengdu changes the landscape every few months and it is easy to get lost.  The temperature is cold again today and we will spend most of the day out of doors.  We arrived just before 11:00 AM and walked through several exhibits explaining the purpose of the facility and the life cycle of Giant Pandas.  There are over 100 pandas in this facility and each year 5-10 more are born through artificial insemination.  The government lends pairs of pandas to zoos all over the world, at a rate of $1 million per year.  Any babies born remain the property of China.  We saw dozens of pandas, most of which were sleeping in trees.  There was one group of four babies, each about 3-4 months, one of which kept crawling in and out of the cage as he could still fit between the bars.

In exchange for a contribution of 2,000 RMB, I was able to enter the enclosure and sit next to a panda which was kept busy eating an apple.  The experience only lasted a couple minutes, and the panda was too large to hold, but not large enough to harm me if he got bored with the apple.  Although the photos showed only the panda and I, we were surrounded by a half-dozen handlers ready to come to my rescue, or probably more accurately the panda’s rescue, if something should go wrong.  It was a great experience and well worth the contribution.

On Sunday, Ying and I had planned to rent a taxi for the day and go to Leshan to see the Giant Buddha.  At 71 meters, this is the largest carved stone Buddha in the world.  But when Ben & Lily heard us discussing this, they suggested that they use their contacts with the Sichuan Education Department to line up some appointments with schools in the area to promote our partnership.  So a few phone calls later, we had arranged to meet principals of two Foreign Language Schools and tour their facilities.  All schools and businesses in China were open this weekend as the government had given the people January 2^nd and 3^rd off for New Year’s holiday, but the time off had to be made up on the weekend.  Lily picked us up at 9:30 AM and we started driving out of the city on the two-hour trip to Leshan.  It was very foggy and we soon came to a police roadblock which had closed the only highway to Leshan due to the fog, so our trip was canceled.

We used the time to visit a senior center which somehow Ben is affiliated with.  The energetic director was all too happy to show us her facility.  I sat and played mahjong with some people for a bit and they were kind enough to let me win.  By noon we were back at our hotel, where I decided to rest for the afternoon as I felt a cold coming on and did not want to be sick when we go to Shanghai tomorrow.

Monday morning there was heavy fog in Chengdu.  I was concerned that the airport would be closed.  Last week, at a new Chinese airport in LiJing, fog closed the airport and some 10,000 passengers in the terminal rioted, causing the new airport employees to abandon their posts.  We packed and checked-out of our hotel and then took a taxi to the airport.  We arrived early enough that we were offered an earlier flight, but then that flight was delayed 5 hours so it became a long day of waiting in the terminal.  We finally took off at 4:30PM and arrived in Shanghai by 7:00PM.  We took a taxi to The Ascott Hotel on Huai Hai Road and checked into our apartment for the next nine days.

The Ascott has a much better location than The New Harbor Apartments where we used to live.  We are in the middle of the Luwan District, and only a couple of blocks from Xintindi, a popular shopping area and site of the first congress of the Chinese Communist Party.  It is still very cold here in Shanghai and both Ying and I have come down with colds.  Ying is busy getting visas for her and her mom to go to Vietnam next week and using our proximity to shopping malls to buy some fashionable Shanghai clothes, but I mostly stay in the hotel and try to stay warm.

Friday night, Ying’s friend Lilly arrived from Beijing for the weekend.  They spent most of the day Saturday shopping, and returned to the hotel in time to go out to one of our favorite restaurants, Simply Thai, for dinner.  We wandered through Xintandi afterwards and bought some baked goods which we took back to the room for dessert.  Sunday morning the girls went on another shopping expedition before Lilly left on a 2:00PM train back to Beijing.

On Monday, Ying’s parents arrived from Fuyung.  We had opened a second room at the hotel for them.  I gave Ying’s father an IPhone 5 for Christmas and we had signed both parents up for classes at the Apple Store, which happens to be in the same building as our hotel.  We ate lunch at our favorite dumpling restaurant, and then had dinner at our apartment, which included a roast chicken, raised by Ying’s aunt and brought to Shanghai by her mom.

Tuesday we went to the Apple Store again for another class.  Both parents were thrilled with the class, and would have registered for a third one, if it were available.  In the late afternoon, we took a taxi over to the Bund where we walked along the river and took pictures of Pudong.  Ying’s father had not been here in 40 years and he said he remembered the road was dirt with nothing on the other side of the river, where Pudong buildings reach 90 stories today.  For dinner we took a taxi to the Grand Hyatt at the Jin Mao Tower in Pudong.  We changed elevators twice to reach the 87^th floor where we could look out over Shanghai as the sun went down.  We had a fabulous dinner at one of the Hyatt’s restaurants which was a grand way of finalizing our trip. 

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