I’m sitting at the 5-star Sheraton in Chengdu, Sichuan province, wondering if it can get any better than this. I’m here on Intel’s dime, a business trip to help the new factory set up their forecasting processes. Originally, I didn’t expect to even consider leaving Shanghai for, well, anywhere else. But here in the land of pandas, spicy food, beautiful landscapes, and even more beautiful women, I’m tempted to just hide here in the Sheraton bathroom and not catch my flight back home on Wednesday.


Chengdu is the capital of Sichuan, as well as capital of the more famous “Land of the Hotty Boom-batties”

There are still a few days left in my stay here, but there have been plenty of highlights so far since I landed here on Thursday afternoon, stumbling through the airport on two hours of sleep (Wednesday night was another firecracker of an all-nighter at the new Shanghai Babyface, but I believe I’ve inundated this blog enough with my whiskey exploits).

- Who would have thought that the best Mexican food I’ve had in Asia (EVER) would be in Chengdu, deep in the western and land-locked part of China? One of the managers took me to Peter’s, a tex-mex house founded by a 20+ year-old traveler who somehow managed to finagle authentic salsa into the Chinese hinterland, much to the delight of the very small expat community in the Sichuan capital. I went there again today and ate enough cheese to feed a small Austrian village. The first night I had a plate of chimichangas, and I’ve concluded that the person who invented the idea of taking a burrito and deep-frying it must be somewhere high up in the Himalayas, the destination of thousands of pilgrimmages from Mexican-loving worshippers like myself. I praise thee, mine Chimichanga lord.

- Gavin, my Chengdu-nese co-worker who I’m helping to train and who was assigned the dubious task of showing me around town, revealed himself as a card-carrying member of PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals). This, after he ordered lunch yesterday for the five of us with meat being the primary deliverable. Though he may be one of hundreds (even thousands) of vegetarians in Chengdu, I’m pretty darn sure he’s the only PETA member in town, perhaps even in the entire province. Since I paid for lunch, I’d like the ask the following question: Gavin, as a vegetarian, why the hell did you order a 280 RMB fish that you weren’t planning on touching with a 20 foot chopstick? More on fish later in a later blog entry. The idea of ethical treatment of animals in Chengdu, by the way, is pretty much lost on the populace. So is vegetarianism. So is not eating every entrail and limb of the animals. Which leads to…

- Spicy Rabbit Head, a Sichuan delicacy that is exactly what it sounds like. It’s spicy. It’s rabbit. And it’s the poor rabbit’s fucking HEAD. Of course, I had to try it, even though the vision of my ex-beauette Shirley getting mad at me for ordering rabbit at the Fog City Diner in San Francisco back in the 90’s entered my mind more than a few times. Shirley would have loved the sight of me chowing down on bunny noggin just as much I would have loved the sight of Dubya winning re-election.

Oh hold on…damn it! Never mind.

The taste is similar to…wait, we’re talking about rabbit head here! I’m guessing goat head and elephant head taste wildly different, but it’s not my place in the world to find that out. Let’s just leave it at that, while I try to erase the memory of those rabbit eyes staring up at me. Although it’s hard when I have a picture below, hehe.


Want a taste?

- Saturday was spent at Leshan (乐山) a couple of hours outside if Chengdu. It’s the site of the famous Big Buddha, a 71 meter high engraving into the cliffs along side the intersection of three different rivers. If that sounds way cool, well actually looking at the Buddha’s big toe is even cooler. It doesn’t end there; there are stairs all along the cliff, and since I and my co-workers have the stamina and health of one normal person (the four of us combined, that is), we climbed up the stairs along the cliffs and reached the inner recesses of the mountain, where most tourists were unwilling to venture. There we found peace, tranquility, and poor farmers selling Pepsi for 2 RMB each (go globalization!). I realized that there are a lot of places in China that are beautiful and peaceful, but you have to fight through thousands of people to get there. I’ll probably never visit Leshan again, but I’ll always know that me and the Big Buddha will be tight since we must share the same interests; namely, 20 meter boobies.


A peaceful moment of rest as we climb away from Big Buddha