China Trip Day 12 - Chengdu
Apr. 14th, 2024 03:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tanithryudoToday's visit was to the Chengdu Museum, which opens at 9, so we left the hotel at 8 for a random breakfast serving place nearby. The taste was meh.
Museum entry was free. Unfortunately it was also very crowded. Were started on the upper floor is and worked our way backwards chronologically. So from near modern, to WWII, to republic era, to late Qing. A lot of this was complicated texts.
Then floor 4 was Sui, Tang, 五代十国, Song, Yuan, Ming, Qing. Then floor 3 was Pre-Qin through Three kingdoms/north & south. Floor 2 was prehistoric times and mostly stuff we'd already seen at other sites.
The place was big, and by the end we were flagging and rushed through floors 2 & 3. Skipped floor 1 as that had a separate international historical jewelry exhibit, which cost a separate fee to enter.
There was also a basement floor which contained a natural life sciences exhibit, geared mostly for kids. We joked that this was probably made up of specimens donated by some dedicated big game hunter. I mean, it was obvious most of the herbivores were "real" preserved specimens. Thankfully the endangered species were just models and not "real". The best part of this exhibit was that the AC was turned up much higher (to preserve the specimens probably), and it was a reprieve from the heat generated by the masses from the above floor exhibits.
After leaving the museum, we went to the underground shopping at Tianfu Plaza for lunch. Picked a random place for soup noodles that were big on portions and meh on taste. Also ordered a 冒菜 veggie item which was quite spicy, but at least ticked off another item in sichuan cuisine.
At that point, the temperature was way too hot to be visiting the People's Park nearby. (High temp today is up to 31 degrees!) We had also briefly considered either the 四川科技馆 or 恐龙量子场, but both of those places seems to be targeted for kids and interest wasn't high. So we just went back to the hotel in the end.
On the way back by IFS, we found a shop for panda paraphernalia which included T-shirts. It's the first and only T-shirts shop with Chengdu related designs I've seem so far! Finally bought a panda T-shirt for the trip!
Back at the hotel, we rested a bit and avoided the high afternoon temperatures.
This evening we went to see the Sichuan opera performance 芙蓉國碎. Dinner was eaten at an upscale restaurant across the street called 柴门头啖汤. Their roasted pigeon and stone pot radish were delicious. Also ordered pig snout (拱觜) turned out to be like bacon. Tasty, but probably not healthy. 😔
The actual opera performance was quite fun. It's obviously been adapted for modern audiences, cut into segments containing the core techniques used, and reducing the amount of cultural context needed. Singing is done with a recorded track, and some of the scores have obviously come from adapted pop music.
The parts that stood out were the 水袖 dances, the acrobatics while holding a lit bowl on the head, the puppet bits, a hand shadow performance, and of course the 变脸 performance. Of these we saw a bit of the fire bowl and 变脸 tricks at Kuanzhai Alley before, but this was definitely more elaborate. Also, I think among the 'faces' swapped, there was a Doraemon and a Spiderman mask. 😂
My favorite bits are the puppets. First the one who plucked a flower out of a bouquet and stuck it in its hair. And then the puppet that also performed 变脸 and spewing fire.
Museum entry was free. Unfortunately it was also very crowded. Were started on the upper floor is and worked our way backwards chronologically. So from near modern, to WWII, to republic era, to late Qing. A lot of this was complicated texts.
Then floor 4 was Sui, Tang, 五代十国, Song, Yuan, Ming, Qing. Then floor 3 was Pre-Qin through Three kingdoms/north & south. Floor 2 was prehistoric times and mostly stuff we'd already seen at other sites.
The place was big, and by the end we were flagging and rushed through floors 2 & 3. Skipped floor 1 as that had a separate international historical jewelry exhibit, which cost a separate fee to enter.
There was also a basement floor which contained a natural life sciences exhibit, geared mostly for kids. We joked that this was probably made up of specimens donated by some dedicated big game hunter. I mean, it was obvious most of the herbivores were "real" preserved specimens. Thankfully the endangered species were just models and not "real". The best part of this exhibit was that the AC was turned up much higher (to preserve the specimens probably), and it was a reprieve from the heat generated by the masses from the above floor exhibits.
After leaving the museum, we went to the underground shopping at Tianfu Plaza for lunch. Picked a random place for soup noodles that were big on portions and meh on taste. Also ordered a 冒菜 veggie item which was quite spicy, but at least ticked off another item in sichuan cuisine.
At that point, the temperature was way too hot to be visiting the People's Park nearby. (High temp today is up to 31 degrees!) We had also briefly considered either the 四川科技馆 or 恐龙量子场, but both of those places seems to be targeted for kids and interest wasn't high. So we just went back to the hotel in the end.
On the way back by IFS, we found a shop for panda paraphernalia which included T-shirts. It's the first and only T-shirts shop with Chengdu related designs I've seem so far! Finally bought a panda T-shirt for the trip!
Back at the hotel, we rested a bit and avoided the high afternoon temperatures.
This evening we went to see the Sichuan opera performance 芙蓉國碎. Dinner was eaten at an upscale restaurant across the street called 柴门头啖汤. Their roasted pigeon and stone pot radish were delicious. Also ordered pig snout (拱觜) turned out to be like bacon. Tasty, but probably not healthy. 😔
The actual opera performance was quite fun. It's obviously been adapted for modern audiences, cut into segments containing the core techniques used, and reducing the amount of cultural context needed. Singing is done with a recorded track, and some of the scores have obviously come from adapted pop music.
The parts that stood out were the 水袖 dances, the acrobatics while holding a lit bowl on the head, the puppet bits, a hand shadow performance, and of course the 变脸 performance. Of these we saw a bit of the fire bowl and 变脸 tricks at Kuanzhai Alley before, but this was definitely more elaborate. Also, I think among the 'faces' swapped, there was a Doraemon and a Spiderman mask. 😂
My favorite bits are the puppets. First the one who plucked a flower out of a bouquet and stuck it in its hair. And then the puppet that also performed 变脸 and spewing fire.
