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Chengdu - Day 4: Pandas!

**** pandas. They take what, 14 years to gestate, give birth to twins, and the mom will usually reject one.... Darwin has been calling but they are too cuddly to give up.

As always thanks for sharing a piece of the world few from this site will get to see.
 
First, wtf was this...

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Secondly, the Panda sanctuary looks incredible. Then I saw the Red Panda section and melted. That place has just shot up my list of 'places I want to go'.
 
JamesB said:
Seeing as your based in HK, have you learnt any Mandarin? Do you find it easy enough to get around with English, I don't know much about Chengdu and if English is widely spoken there.

Hong Kong uses Cantonese, though to be honest Mandarin is a lot more useful as you can very easily get by in Hong Kong using just English. The cities in Mainland China, not so much. Busy tourist spots, like the panda place, will have English speaking staff, but outside of those, not so much. You'll find that quite a lot of the younger people, especially university students/graduates, will speak some English though. I just make sure that I've got things planned out pretty meticulously, which I don't tend to do for other countries.

peep said:
First, wtf was this...

I think, based on the "terminator" statues outside holding guns, that it was some sort of dark ride shooter. I don't actually know to be honest.
 
^ You can. You just have to fly to Chengdu and make the necessary "donation". There's a megalite in it for you as well.
 
Do you think they're likely to stop the whole 'hold a panda' thing though? I can't think why they'd need to unless one of them is hurt while its happening.

Also you keep putting 'donation' in inverted commas. Was it s very small amount? Or the complete opposite?
 
^I've been putting it in quotation marks since it's not a donation at all. They call it that, and the money goes directly into the research base, but it's not like you can just stick a few coins in a collection tin and grab a panda.

There's a lot of money coming in from the "donations", so I don't see them stopping it. In fact, the government stepped in and regulated it as, apparently, it was possible to negotiate the price on quieter days.
 
^ Yeah, 100% compulsory. I guess it has to be since they limit the numbers. They want to get as much money as possible from the 40/50 people it's limited to.
 
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