Panda Spotting Becomes Easier

by Iva Skoch on

It just got a little bit easier to see Giant Pandas–there are more of them. The Chinese government reports that 2006 has been a banner year for panda cubs. According to China Daily, the government’s official English language newspaper, artificial insemination done at panda breeding centers around China has produced a record 27 healthy cubs, out of 30 born live. Scientists first started breeding them in 1960.

Only 1,590 are thought to live in the wild, while another 180 live in zoos or breeding centers worldwide.

We traveled to the Chengdu’s breeding facility last year, which is just outside the city of Chengdu, right in the center of China. It’s a beautiful park, and well worth the visit. If you choose to travel to see the pandas, be sure to also read up on the much larger Wolong Nature Preserve, further north of Chengdu. And don’t forget to sample the wonderful food of the Sichuan region!

Building or Chinese Menu Item?

by Iva Skoch on

Seeing pictures of the proposed new biomedical research center in Chengdu, China (Szechuan province) reminded me of some menu items I tried in that city last year. One reporter called the proposed building “the blob.”

The Szechuan province, of course, is home to that terrific spicy food that is ubiquitous in Chinese restaurants everywhere, usually on the menu right next to an asterisk or a nearby ‘chili pepper’ icon, signifying “this food is hot as hell.”

The traditional and most popular way of eating food in Chengdu is the hotpot. Basically, you’re given a large bowl of boiling, flavored oil that sits atop your table, while you cook skewers of various foods in the oil–kind of like fondue without the cheese. Most of the time, you have some rough idea of what it is you’re cooking, since you picked it off the shelf yourself. The best oil, we were told, was as old as possible: as oil burned off and was eaten, the bowl was topped up; if you cleaned the bowl and used fresh oil, you killed the taste. The older the oil, the better. The table has a hole in it and sits above an industrial-sized propane tank and burner, one to each table. With the cooking-oil-slick floors and open flames everywhere, it’s an American trial-lawyer’s dream.

Back to the building: the building, it seems, was meant to look like a cell, peppered with meeting room pods which were meant to look like embedded proteins around the outside. And the shape? You can see for yourself. Care for a dip in the interior’s “mitochondrial” pools?

Yep, looks and sounds like something I’d be dunking in a bath of ancient, bubbling oil, filled with chili oil and fish heads.