DATELINE: Chengdu, China 

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Author: Lauren Cohen

Early in my trip, I almost made plans to bypass Chengdu because of bad weather. I'm so glad I decided to, as Mom would say, play it by ear. I have had a great time here and wish I could stay a little longer (but I'm also eager to get to Yunnan). I did experience my first rainy day in China yesterday. I put on my poncho and set out to find Chen's Mapo Doufu, the oldest mapo tofu restaurant in Chengdu. After much searching, and my map nearly getting ruined in the process, I made it. Wow! Delicious!! And for those of you who are shocked that I ate tofu for lunch, I must point out that it was topped with ground pork. The rain had gotten worse after lunch, so I decided to take a taxi back to the hostel, instead of a bus. It felt like I had to wait forever to find an empty one! (I guess it's like finding a cab in NYC in the rain.) I sat in the front seat of the taxi so I could easily show the driver my map, which was bilingual and also had directions to the hostel printed in Chinese. He shook his head and motioned with his hand that I should get out of the taxi. Not eager to go back into the rain, I did what any good New Yorker would do: I took out a pen and wrote down his license number. Well, he quickly changed his mind! He did try to get away with not using the meter though, but I quickly noticed and motioned for him to turn it on. Bam. Nothing gets by this chick. This morning I woke up early to tour the Panda Breeding Center. The pandas were amazing! I've never seen one in person before. The adult pandas had just been fed and were lazily munching on bamboo. Pandas can only digest 20% of their food, so they move around very little to conserve energy. They rarely mate and often have to be artificially inseminated. Also, mother pandas often lack a maternal instinct and become frightened and hurt their babies after giving birth. All in all, they are pretty much the most poorly evolved creature in nature; but they're adorable and beloved so conservationists work hard to keep them alive. I saw a tiny infant panda in it's incubator. It was so small that it wasn't even cute yet, just squirmy and pink. The highlight was a bit of a splurge for a once-in-a-lifetime experience: for a donation of 500� (about $75), I was allowed inside one of the panda enclosures! I pet and hugged a giant panda and a worker took lots of pictures of me with it. It was worth the money! I met some Israeli backpackers while on the panda tour, and they invited me to a Sichuan cooking class this afternoon. Tonight I will fly to Lijiang and begin my tour of Yunnan Province. In other great news, I was finally able to secure a train ticket! I'll be in a soft sleeper (the more luxurious option, with a curtain and only 2 berths stacked atop each other instead of the hard sleeper's 3) for the 23-hour journey from Kunming to Guangzhou. What an exciting way to close out my travels within China.