We arrived at the Chengdu airport around 9:30 am, I think and we were all definitely ready for a nap, no question. We got on our bus and were taken into the city, and we checked into our hotel, which was right across the street from an enormous Crowne Plaza Holiday Inn (I didn't realize those two companies were connected, I never really thought of them as being in the same class of hotels). Our hotel is right around the corner from a pedestrian mall/shopping area. Basically it's outdoors - as if they took all the stores in a mall and removed the walls and roof.
We went to lunch, and our first Sichuan food experience was not a success. Let me start by saying that Sichuan (you may be more familiar with it as Szechuan) province is VERY hot, and the food is as well, because, as our guide explained: "In order to get the sweat, you have to eat the hot, spicy food." However, they don't just do hot, spicy food in Sichuan. The very first dish they put down in front of us was chicken feet. Then they followed that with a bowl of tripe. Um, yum. I did not taste the chicken feet, I'll be honest. They looked like chicken feet, and were plae white and kind of pimply. I was willing to try stuff, because hey, half the reason we were there was for a cultural exchange, but they were chicken feet. Someone in our group did try them, and she said that they tasted just like you'd expect them to: like knuckles. Again, mm, yum. There was also some kind of pale green bumpy thing which they said was bitter herb. One person at our table tried it, and he said it was really bitter indeed. There was edamame, which I actually kind of liked - I didn't know they were a form of soy bean until later, but that was definitely something to try again in the future. There were a number of very spicy dishes that were so spicy that I couldn't eat them, and there was a dish of what they called bullfrog, which I actually thought was pretty good. It's hard to describe it, but it has a similar texture to crab, although the flavor isn't quite as strong. There were also a number of dumpling type foods that were quite good. They also had a bunch of bean curd/paste things that were really sweet, although they were brought out in the middle of the meal. Generally, the Chinese don't really do desert, although they do have these sweet courses in the middle of the meal. You always know the meal is over when they bring out the watermelon. However, that hasn't stopped Haagen Dazs from opening several stores in China - one in Chengdu and one in Beijing (that I saw - there could have been more, but I didn't see any).
After the meal we went to the Sichuan Province Department of Education, even though we thought we were going to have a free afternoon. I don't know if I said it, but in China there are three levels of control over education: National, provincial and local (cities, villages). In all honesty, I didn't get a whole lot out of the meeting with the dept. of ed folks, because I was so tired, but also becuase there were translation problems. Our guide, Jim, didn't know he was going to have to translate, so he was unprepared to do it. Plus it's really hard, I would imagine. I also think that some of the numbers and details we got weren't entirely accurate.
What I did learn that was interesting was that Sichuan has the second largest Tibetan population outside of Tibet and 75% of the population in this province is rural. They also have a much smaller teacher/student ratio (about 1 to 22, which is more than half what it was in Beijing or Xi'an, where it was about 1 to 50 or 60). I wonder how much of the rural population is really attending school.
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