8 April 2013
Tibetan beggars
My last full day in Chengdu, tomorrow I start the long journey home, which from hotel to my front door will take something like 26 hours! More on that tomorrow, I am strangely excited to sit on 3 planes and spend 4 hours in Hong Kong airport.
Today I didnt take too many photos, mainly because I was carrying bags full of gifts for my large network of friends (yeah right! I have zero).
I did however walk for many many hours, including through the tibetan quarter, also called little Lhasa. This is in many ways the worst part of Chengdu, because its full of beggars. Monks begging, cripples, crippled monks, you name it. I didnt really experience such behaviour anywhere else in Chengdu.
Apparently there are a lot of hostels for people that want to get high with monks to prove they are worldly somewhere in this area, I didnt see any though. I did see a sad sight of a bunch of westerners on an open mini bus tour though.
Heres a truck that presumably goes to Tibet. Complete with swastikas. I doubt you can go overland like that as a westerner. You can go on the train or by plane to Lhasa and thats it. And even then you need all kinds of permits.
Monks shopping for crap.
Beggar clothing supplies. Men and women dress the same actually (at least I think some were women! Hard to tell with shaven heads).
Time for lunch, this panda brand is more and more popular across China. But so very expensive. T-shirts are $50! Yet I see lots of people wearing them. Perhaps they are wearing fakes.
My lunch is a kind of hot pot. Twice cooked something. Its a mixture of rubbery animal products. I dont know what! The white rubbery stuff was not too nice. The red rubbery stuff was.
Story time, this meal came from a place where you buy a stored value card first. I got to the front of the line, handed over enough cash to cover my meal, when a business man raced up, pushed me aside and handed over a large sum. I looked around he had about 5 guys with him, treating them to lunch in a mall food court?
Anyways, I decided he was trying to look important with his fellow men in suits. So I stood aside and waited. The lady processed his card first, my cash sat on the counter. So as she handed him his card, I grabbed it and walked off.
This was highly amusing to the 5 or so mainly women he had pushed in front of in addition to myself. So now I had his card with about 10x the amount of cash stored on it compared to what I was paying. Whats he to do?
I turned around, he looked mad as hell, but also small and pathetic. So I walked straight past him and handed his card to someone else from his lunch party.
Later on whilst I was eating my lunch I saw him at the counter of the place where he had ordered from yelling and further making a fool of himself.
I need to burn through my remaining yuan, so I paid for delicious glutinous rice ball dessert. It was great.
Last photo for today, near my hotel I found this weird market selling mainly books, coins, notes, old newspapers, stamps.
But most of the books were pornographic! I thought that kind of thing was banned in China. They seemed to disguise themselves as nature journals, basically Chinese girls who have decided to go on a walk through the forest without their clothing.
A rather dodgy looking guy chased me with an armful of them.