16/10 The sun in Chengdu - Strange foods finally

Sunday 16^th October

Caught up on blog.  Checked departure time for flights.  Lazy breakfast on the roof garden when . . . the SUN came out! Unbe(bloody)lieveable. It is dazzling the screen as I type. Brekky morphed into lunch then we headed off to the restored Old Teahouse Street. We have been engaged in a running campaign to buy all the grandchildren little tokens with their Chinese Zodiac signs. Initially we were missing two, then were delighted to find them, but lost one :o( So today back to the original shop  to see if they had obtained new stock – NO. Catastrophically, it was Caitlin’s that was lacking. She is a tad lacrimose and would have cried for three weeks. But we did find the missing item. In fact, without wishing to extend a challenge . . . we have bought a couple of spares for the next 2 years . . . NO Cassandra . . five IS enough. We are becoming quite conscious that it is better not to tell Chinese about all the children and grandchildren because they seem uncomfortable with that.

Being Sunday, the locals were out in force and the snack food merchants were doing very well barbequing all sorts of things. We looked at the golden prawns but were not at all tempted by the rabbit heads, sundry bugs or whole scorpions. C had a very good mango sorbet that was so cold he got a sore throat. We ventured into Dico’s again and ordered the same chicken roll, but it was riddled with pepper, which seems fairly common here.

We had walked that road a few times and J decided for variety to veer right along the river and return on a parallel road one block east. This was very interesting and offered any number of very enticing glades under weeping trees with benches to watch the river and the people passing by. A wide variety of very well groomed dogs, some wearing little booties.

                                                         Poo in boots?

 Babies . . families  . . old people . . lots of live music. They like to get outside in a peaceful shaded setting and relax. The sun stayed up half a day and contributed to our enjoyment.

As expected, the road retraced the path of the 28 bus and took us straight home. We settled for noodles for dinner and prepared for the weekly quiz . . yes we have finally managed to be here for one.  Not too sure on the section on China which ranks 20% of the total. Blaise where are you?

Just a note for connoisseurs of rough grog. The stuff we bought at Chong Qing is apparently a rice-based spirit vaguely like arak. Interestingly, when I twisted the top to unscrew it, it only rotated once and a small nozzle protruded. The top doesn’t come off and when you screw it backwards the nozzle retracts again, sealing the bottle. The more you drink . . the cleverer this seems.

Drinking rotgut probably wasn’t the best preparation for the quiz. We partnered with a young couple of Poms who had cycled here from Mongolia. We shot through to an early lead and got presented with beers after each of the first 3 rounds. At this stage we were over-thinking a few and changing first thoughts which were right. Round 4 was obscure movie quotes and we lost a few points before getting massacred in round 5 which was all very recent dance music.  We finished 3^rd and had a really good night. It ran for a full 3 hours . . not quite sure how.