As a last huzzah before Finals Week, last weekend my friends and I hopped onto a 3 hour plane to Chengdu, the capital of the Sichuan Province of China and also known as the Home of the Giant Panda. We ended up staying there for two days and three nights, and by the end of the short-lived trip, we were very glad that we were able to squeeze it in before the end of the semester. It provided a last push for us to wrap up our study abroad semester in China.

But I’m getting a little ahead of myself. We must address probably the most important, and definitely the most cutest, part of the trip. The first day we spent in Chengdu was spent squealing over the cute, sleepy, and amusingly clumsy pandas in the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding, which was about an hour shuttle bus ride from our Airbnb. We had met up with an old friend of my friend, who was her exchange student many years ago and generously served as our navigator for the day, as he was a student of a relatively nearby university in Chengdu. 

The park was filled with lush greenery that was mostly made up of tall bamboo stalks that at times towered over us and beautiful ponds and small lakes, where ducks and geese would literally swim up to you to greet you. It was magnificent to see all of that green. None of the zoos that I had been to before looked anything like the inside of this park, and the pictures don’t do it much justice.

Of course, it had endless amounts of designated panda enclosures, most of which were all outside. The pandas had plenty of room to roam around and to just… be pandas: all the enclosures had some sort of wooden playground structure that they could either nap on or lounge about and some trees that they could climb up and get stuck in should they please. It was just endless amounts of entertainment watching the pandas. For example, we watched one who was quite obviously stuck up high in a tree try his hardest to climb down but ultimately decided to just accept his fate for the time being. We also watched some adorable baby pandas stumble around, trying out their new paws. Whenever any one of us spotted a panda, it was instantly the greatest new thing we had ever seen. It’s a given that I bought a lot, and I mean a lot, of panda goodies at the various souvenir shops around the vast park.

After we had seen our fill of pandas (we probably spent a close to five hours or so at the park), we took the shuttle bus back to the area around our Airbnb, which happened to be near a huge shopping district filled with shopping malls. For an early dinner, we sat down and had the famous Sichuan spicy hotpot, where we ate a bunch of interesting meats, like stomach lining, duck blood, and liver, much to the insistence of our local friend. We were also served drinkable cold yogurt, in case we needed it to calm the fiery burn of that Sichuan spicy hot broth. Needless to say, we had quite the adventurous dinner that night!

To aid in digestion, we wandered into a random shopping mall and waddled around there for awhile with soup bellies. That was when my friend spotted a Vietnamese restaurant, and it was all over. We quickly made the decision to have tomorrow’s lunch there before we had dinner with my friend’s old math professor. It was a pretty easy decision, considering two out of the three of us were craving Vietnamese food and the third friend had been wanting to try Vietnamese food. Once night fell, we parted ways with my friend’s old exchange student, and we headed back to our Airbnb, where we played card games and talked for hours into the night.

The next morning, after sleeping in comfortably, we hurried over to that Vietnamese restaurant for lunch, stopping by to get $2 (you heard me) large brown sugar coffee lattes. I could barely contain my excitement as I flipped through the menu, feelings of nostalgia and homesickness and longing for home flooding my senses all at once. My friends were equally excited to have some Vietnamese food with me, sensing my eagerness, so we quickly ordered our food: two orders of pho (one chicken and the other beef), one order of bun, which is basically a cold noodle salad dish, one order of spring rolls, and one order of eggrolls.

Let me tell you, tears were shed all around that day. My friend, who for the first time ate eggrolls the Vietnamese way (wrapped up in lettuce and mint leaves), was also brought to tears at how good they were. But I cried for a different reason. The food genuinely tasted so similar to my mom’s home cooking, and the longing for home hit me harder than ever before. The sauce, nuoc mam, in particular was almost dead on similar. Just a drop of that garlicky, salty, sweet, and sour sauce by itself was enough to bring tears to my eyes, and it was a testament to how good the food was going to be. The refreshing bun dish perked up my taste buds, which, over the course of the semester, had slowly developed an unbearable craving of the fresh, floral, and bright flavors of Vietnamese cooking. It had taken me a trip to Chengdu to finally find some Vietnamese food in China, and the discovery of this restaurant made me that much more glad to have gone on this trip. Eating here was what gave me some energy to last for the rest of the semester. We were almost done, and I knew that I would be able to have that familiar and comforting Vietnamese food again.

We walked around the shopping mall until it was time to have dinner with my friend’s math teacher. He generously fed us a delicious Filipino dinner, and it was a pleasure to spend time at his wonderful apartment with his family. Before long, though, we had to go back to our Airbnb, pack our stuff, and then pull an all-nighter by playing cards and snacking on foods until it was time for us to leave for the airport. Our flight was at 6am, so we figured that it would be better to just stay up. We were back on campus by 9am, and after an emotionally and physically adventurous weekend, you know I passed out for a good while, dreaming of cute and cuddly pandas.

Thanks for reading! 🙂

-Justine