Yesterday I spent the morning touring the Panda Breeding Center with two other people from the hostel: a Frenchwoman studying Chinese and who spoke good English and a Korean, also studying Chinese here and not very fluent in English. However, his English is a million times better than my Chinese of Korean. Thanks to both of them we were able to time it perfectly to see the pandat eating. It is quite the trip to see dozens of people from around the world getting their kicks off watching a black and white teddy bear eat bamboo. The more noise it made, the happier the crowd was.
The breeding park has been successful in doing something not achieved elsewhere in the world: having twins successful be birthed and live. There are now three baby pandas in the incubators or with their mothers.
Like so many animals in the world, they are threatened by habitat destruction and a die-off of some of their favorite bamboo. It really speaks to the problem of being too specialized. These cute animals are faced with a specialed diet in a world that is needing their land. The Chinese have set aside large tracts of land to protect them and hopefully this will allow them to rebound. There is no place in the world that these bears are found.
One thing that made me chuckle was that a lot of the quotes that are spread throughout the park are from American naturalists like Muir. It speaks to one of the exports that the United States has brought: setasides of natural lands for future generations and the protection of animals.
Today I visited a site dedicated to one of China's main poets who lived in the 700's: Dufu. (People did chuckle when my pronounciation of the site meant I wanted to see Tofu's site....:-)
Here is a link to some of this poetry. I'd never heard of him, but can now see how powerful his poetry has been for different generations of Chinese. I don't know what influence he had on future generations, but his poetry really points to the inequities between the haves and have nots. http://www.chinapage.org/poet-e/dufu2e.html
The Dufu Thatched Cottage park is a mixture of park, history, archaeology, and gift shops. It was raining lightly throughout my whole visit and gave it all a light wash. It was quite pretty and I'd recommend a visit if you ever make it here. I did take a long break at one of their tea houses. They had a gazillion teas: green, Chrysanthemum, jasmine. I had a green tea. They place the loose tea in a cup, fill the cup a third of the way with very hot water, then cover it.... then they leave. What to do next? I drank it and soon found out by watching that they drink the tea while holding the saucer... I never did figure out what to do with all the loose tea that I kept pulling our of my mouth. Eventually they all settled to the bottom.
One of the volunteers here helped plan my itinerary for the day and even helped with telling me which buses to take: the buses cost 1yuan. At an exchange rate of 7 yuan to the dollar, it isn't very expensive to ride a bus here. As long as you don't get turned around... which is what happen to me this afternoon/evening as I returned from another park. This is such a big city (somewhere between 4-7 million) and my map is so small that I wasn't sure where I was, so instead of taking the bus I took a taxi... still pretty inexpensive and it turned out that I was only 5 minutes from the hostel!
The tao part of the story is my visit to the Taoist temple. It is a very large complex with many people visiting and practicing/praying/making offerings. The priests conducted a ceremony/service. There were young and old offering incense and candles wile praying and and bowing. Some of the statues are over 30 feet high and well preserved. Here is a link to information about the taoist temple: http://www.impression.org.cn/?action-viewthread-tid-811
It appears that people are returning to openly practicing a religion that has been a part of this country for many centuries, just like what seemed evident in the western reaches of Sichuan, where Buddhism is openly and very actively practiced. It is a land of contrasts. Whereas most people try to fit things into either/or boxes: China has a blend of a market economy with a strong centralized goverment, active communist party, with people practicing traditional religions. It doesn't fit into any easy category. Maybe it is just what it is and our attempts to try to fit it into a box will only continue to meet with misunderstanding.
During my walk through the taoist temple I walked by a door and there was a woman playing a traditional Chinese stringed instrument. They invited me in and I listened to her play for a while. I captured that on a recording and it was beautiful. Just outside there was a 60ish woman singing a traditional Chinese style of song while young people wandered with MP3 players in their pockets and bowing in a temple of antiquity. Just like yesterday when I was having a cup of coffee at Starbucks at the edge of a 1200 year old monument/park with buses going by with billboards for KFC and Wal-Mart.
Traveling expands our thinking and our hearts if we let it. We can try to fit everything into OUR neat little boxes or we can choose to use it as a form of meditation in action. Everything is changing right before our eyes. But that is the same way things are in our daily life, it just seems more static because of our habits. This trip has helped to rearrange my worldview, once again. There are many ways to travel and the way that I prefer is to go to a place and be there for a while. I don't like, nor do I do well when I am constantly on the move... which is probably why this upper respiratory virus hangs on- something that I'm about to resolve by settling into a place for a while.
Catch you on another episode.
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