Visiting Chinese highlands - Part 3

Chengdu

After the visit to the highlands we enjoyed Chengdu.

Leshan Giant Buddha

The big buddha lies on the junction of  Minjiang, Dadu and Qingyi rivers. It is a massive 71m tall Buddha statue carved out of the sandstone mountain in the early 700 AD. This river junction was always plagued with big floods and people were desperate to solve the flooding issue. "Why not build a big Buddha to protect us from the floods?". For a non-believer like me it is an idiotic idea, but why the heck, it may have done wonders for all I know. Maybe the big luck was it being a big tourist attraction.

On the way up to the Buddha I photographed a nice statue of a lion, when I caught up with my wife she told me it means bad luck to photograph that statue. It was written on it in chinese of course and with my chinese reading skills it made no difference. For a non-believer like me it was a tough time playing cards later. I think my unlucky cards for the next week would be far beyond statistically possible. Of course I was the laughing stock of everyone as well, "Do you believe in the lion now?". 

Now let me pick the Buddha's nose :-)

For some people, a white guy like me was just as big of an attraction

There's more and more tourists coming to China, even platinum blonde white guys like me. less and less often it happens but sometimes I get asked to join total strangers for a picture. Chinese generally has very little body hair so they also admire my blonde furry arms.

Family photo :-)

Golden Monkeys

My call name in china has for a long time been, "Jin-Hou-si", meaning golden monkey, which is not a bad call name. The name makes sense, first of all because

Mum and her baby

I have platinum blonde hair and furry arms, secondly because I am born in the year of the monkey. Although I have been called monkey before in not nice terms, in china monkey is a good, considered the smartest of the animals of the Chinese calendar.

and I am daddy monkey..

In a very nice scenic forest along the rivers we found my animal family and for some reason they had interest in me, maybe they thought I was one of them because of my blonde furry arms. These monkeys are playful like monkeys most, but are endangered and protected with maybe around 350 of them at this park.

Tour De Force of Face Changing

perforner at the Sichuan Opera face changing show

In Chengdu I visited the Sichuan Opera. The opera is famous for the face changing technique, something that has been popular since the ancient history. Technique has changed and these guys can now change mask in a fraction of a second, up to 10 masks in 20 seconds.