Foot Massage

Besides the basic massages, there are more elaborate ones to be had - foot massage is one of the most popular kinds. The foot massage places are more spa-like and usually have a large foot sign. Today a friend talked me into going for my first foot massage.

(I innocently asked to use the washroom when we arrived, but the light in their windowless facilities was not working. They ended up handing me a long, lit candle to use. There was no place in the bathroom to set the candle, so I managed to manouver my way through things, using the eastern style toilet and holding a candle in one hand and paper in the other. Now I think maybe I just should have just used the washroom with the door wide open - they were a little 'buhaoyisi' (embarrassed) about it. There were both men and women there, btw.)

The massage was very nice - you could tell they were paying proficient attention to both location and amount of pressure. We chatted with the women who worked on us, and found out they studied for three years to do the work but it was pretty tiring. They work on three or four people a day. One hour of foot massage, plus nice twinges for the rest of the day, was 40 RMB (not quite six bucks).

按摩, Massage

Massage is very cheap here - you can get one hour massages for ten to twenty RMB (1.40 to 2.80) in rooms with several tables lined up and people being worked on through their clothes. The place I've usually gone is fun to visit - the massage therapists are all gossiping with each other and with the customers and you are relaxed by the atmosphere as well as the treatment, though it is pretty rough compared to massages I have received back home. The girls sometimes use their knees and feet to work on your back and butt.

My first visit was greeted with some uncertainty, and they rolled another customer over so he could tell me in English that I would have to wait twenty minutes. I replied in Chinese and they were all really impressed, though we had some communication problems later on - they had to get the same customer to ask me how I felt, and then a few of them all tried saying 'how do you feel?' in English, which they all thought was very funny. On another visit, they were worried again and tried to find a customer who spoke Mandarin. (Some here are embarrassed about their non-standard Chinese, but it's all the same to me right now!)That place has recently raised their prices from 15 to 20 kuai but it is still packed.

Panda Base

After four months living near these poster children for all things endangered and wild, I finally got out to see them at the panda base just outside the city.

This fellow was looking for food near the entrance. I later saw a female peacock and a very adorable chick, but it was really tough to get a picture – the chick was coloured to blend in with the grass.


You are supposed to visit in the morning when the pandas are feeding. This is as close as I got to one (a metre or so); there was a plastic door between us. They lay on their backs and stuff their faces with bamboo, which is pretty fun to watch.





I got to the base around ten thirty and many of the adult animals were already snoozing.



There are several enclosures for the pandas, mostly grouped by age – adults, young adults, and cubs. There is also a panda nursery, but we didn’t see any babies. I did think the educational aspect of the research base was very well done, with lots of information about the bears' life and the work being done at the station. (There is another, bigger one at Wolong.) These are young pandas.


The red pandas, while not the star attraction, were more fun to watch than the giant pandas – they were much more active, and beautifully coloured.


At the base I saw more foreigners than I had ever seen so far in Chengdu – one man was marveling that he’d paid fifteen US dollars to see two sleeping pandas at San Diego zoo. (Entrance is 30 rmb, about 4.50 CAD) There were a group of Indian men and a group of European tourists. Some were speaking French and some a language I could not identify.

Mother and child monument at the entrance:

Chun Xi Lu

This is the downtown shopping street, which is not open to cars. One of the better places to hang out and people watch.

Art Auction

On the way home from the art market I walked over to the culture park, where the Green Ram Temple is. I walked past the tea houses and heard a woman with a microphone giving what I thought was a lecture. I was tired from walking so I stopped to try and figure out what her speech was about. She had a Chinese painting on display and was reading its title and telling us how old it was. She was asking the audience questions, I thought about the painting. Then she rolled it up and gave it to someone, and I realized that I was at an art auction.

I went up to look at a couple of them more closely – they were mostly simply done watercolours. A few of them had really nice brush work. This ‘five tiger’, which I thought was one of the better ones, went for slightly over 100 kuai.



I bid on one of the few smaller framed pictures. The auctioneer was asking for fifteen and I put up my hand. She seemed startled and asked what my bid was. I said fifteen in Chinese, and her assistant repeated it and all my subsequent Chinese bids in English. I ended up paying twenty four kuai for it, about 3.70.

The art auction crowd:

Antique and Art markets

Dufu’s Cottage is in a big park close to the west first ring. It’s been towards the bottom of my list of places to visit in the city for a while and I finally made it out there on Labour Day, which falls on May 1 here. Turned out the admission fee was higher than I expected, so I didn’t go in. My disappointment was only temporary because there is a very un-touristy antique and jewelry market right beside the entrance.


Because it is a holiday, many of the stalls were closed but several vendors had wares laid out on the ground – mostly jade, some pottery, old coins and such. The atmosphere is typical of a market here – very laid back, with vendors sleeping or playing cards. Besides the outdoor area, there is a large multistory building full of dusty stalls. One of them had quite a few Shu artifacts and bronze. It was very neat to walk around in, but places like this make the language barrier so frustrating – I would really like to understand this stuff more, ask about it and converse about it, but can’t.

I also walked back to the Songxian Bridge curio art city, an art market between Dufu’s cottage and the Green Ram Temple. This place was fantastic – lots of high end and low end stuff, artists working.

Some Chinese cubism:


I found a jewelry store packed with pieces that did not look Chinese at all, with different stones – turquoise and carnelian. I recognized the ‘om’ symbol on some of them. I asked the vendor about one type of ornament but couldn’t understand his answer except that everything was from Tib*t. He was also Tib*tan and was telling me good places to visit in China (using Sichuanhua - Qinghai province is ‘hao de hen’). I will definitely return to that store, it was great.

There was one guy doing fabulously detailed pictures as wood burnings. He had a tool that looked a bit like a dull chisel on the end. The pictures he could make with such a rough looking tool were amazing. One of the neater shops was full of Commun*st memorabilia – there were large portraits of Marx, Engels, Ma*, Len*n, and Stal*n. The shop also had sunny triptychs of workers, peasants, and people gathered in a circle contentedly studying a red book.