Duhh

I arrived in Chengdu this morning after a 36-hour-long train ride that I thought was going to take 10. Somehow when I asked what time the train would arrive, I assumed the information leady meant 5:45 am the next morning, and not 5:45 am the morning after! If I'd thought about it at all, it should've been really obvious. Chengdu is pretty much on the opposite side of China from Hangzhou, and the super fast train from Beijing to Shanghai already takes 12 hours.

The funny thing is I didn't even realize this until I woke up after the first night on the train and asked my neighbor if we'd almost reached Chengdu. He looked at me kind of funny then said, "Well if a little more than 24 hours means we're almost there, then yes." Heehee. How embarassing. I probably should've just sprung for plane tickets, which would've saved about 34 hours of train time.

So anyway, this morning I checked into the Mix Hostel (really nice, highly recommend) and met a girl from Guilin who wanted to eat at nearby Wenshu Monastery. We walked there in about 5 minutes, and I tried a few interesting new dishes that are Sichuan specialties. I'll soon add entries for both Shanghai and Hangzhou, where I ate a billion things I've never tried before (most notably several varieties of fish and a new fruit called yang mei) and spent the past week with relatives on both my mom and dad's sides of the family.

Tomorrow I'm going to the panda reserve near Chengdu, then taking a flight out to Jiuzhaigou. I'll return to Chengdu for one night on the 29th, then fly out to Guilin to meet Eva from my original China Crew. Hopefully we'll have an all-inclusive China Crew reunion here one day, but for now small things like school and work keep getting in the way, booo. And I'm off.