so we had our first day in chengdu!! It seems to be a really nice plce, we arrived after our 17 hour journey from xi'an whcih was quite good. Me, tony, dave and sarah played cards and looked at all the hills and waterfalls it was beautiful scenery to be on a train through. In the evening on the train we played poker and taught xin to play, although he was too good we feel he may have fibbed about not knowing how to play!! At 6.30am we checked in to the hoteland arranged to meet at 10 but i overslept so tony and i explored by ourselves (i didnt get much sleep on the train, not as comfy as the first)

At 11am we went to a dumpling place again, but none have been as good as the first,v and had to order our food by what others were eating!! we then caught a taxi to the Peoples Park. It was beautiful as all the flowers were in bloom and big hedges had been made to look like pandas and dragons! There was a woman singing kareoke and it was so bad it hurt our ears, i mean it was really terrible!! We went to the 'haunted house' which was in long tunnels whcih scared me as i thought they were going to turn the lights out, but it turned out it was little walkways with really noisy mechanical figures with (quite creepy) masks on them!! not quite what we were expecting!I had an ice cream and we decided to catch a cab to an amusement park (after the trouble we had in beijing we thought it was better to get a taxi!!)

the theme park was really cool, it had lots of stalls to win prizes and arcades and there was actually a roller coaster and a ferris wheel, we finally found one!! we decided not to go ont the roller coaster as they wanted to keep our bags and we didnt want to leave all of our valuables. so we decided to go on the wheel. the views of the city were amazing, althouigh i was convinced the ferris wheel was gonna break, it creaked really weirdly! a group of chinese girls kept taking pictures of tony and giggling, very funny!

when we got back jonny, katie and juliet took us to snackstreet where we had some delicious food and there wass ome chinese celebrity there (i took a picture as everyone else was!!) they tols us they were all going to the sichan opera so as id heard about it in beijing i really wanted to go.

we got a private bus and sat down in a small outdoor theatre (it had buildaings round in and a roof over the seats but it was actually outside!)The show was amazing, people in chinese outdits, playing instruments, a man doing amazing shadow puppets a couple (women are known as spciy in chengdu and are in control of there men and grab them by the ear) depicting spicy women! the bes bit of th show were the changing faces, men and womn constantly changing their masks, but they do it so fast you cant see, it was fantastic, there weas even a man breathing fire!! truly an unmissable evening.

we very much like chengdu so far.