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24.9.1990

     We leave Xian in the evening. Now we have more experience and buy easily tickets sleeping car. Our next stage is Chengdu, capital of the province of Sichuan, 885 km. in the southwest of Xian. As in the train some days ago, traditional melodies are in the air. We quickly begin to chatter with our fellow travelers. Their English is rather good, so we manage to obtain interesting informations for the next days. They recommend the Binjiang hotel reserved to the Chinese, comfortable and cheap. About the cookery in Sichuan we have to know it’s famous all over the region but extremely spiced! Now, amused, we learn to say “putchajdjo” = not to hot!!! Everybody laughs. A wonderful music is playing. I want to know the name of it; perhaps I’ll find the CD. A lady knows it but results a long discussion concerning the calligraphy. I conclude their mysterious signs are very complicated, even for this team of engineers and businessmen. Finally the answer is written in my notebook. So run away 18 hours not realizing we arrive in Chengdu.

     It’s midday. The weather is mild; the sun is shining. We find easily Binjiang hotel. No problem being “not Chinese”.     We take a nice room with bathroom; we refresh and soon are outside searching for a snack. Just opposite the hotel, along the Jin River, attractive little restaurants. On one of the terraces a pretty young waitress invites us, in perfect English, to taste the well-known Sichuan’s dishes. We agree her offer insisting on “putchajdjo”!  We enjoy the princely dinner – a large dish of fried noodles, black mushrooms with a delicious exotic sauce. Very cheap. The prices, till now, are really low and until now the limit of our diagram of expenses is not exceeded.

     Chengdu existed already 770 years B.J-C. In the second century before our era it was the capital of the kingdom of Sichuan. At that period they called it “The City of the Magistrates of the Brocarts” because its citizens manufactured brocart. Much of its traditional aspects didn’t survive the “cleaning” of the years ’50 but numerous superior institutes and its University gave rise to a cultural youth as we note walking on the large avenues bordered with plane trees. Desirous to contact foreigners, girls and boys accost us asking: “Can I help you”. It’s a pleasure looking at the charming girls defiling on their bikes on the wide spaces reserved for the cyclists and not crowded like in Peking.