peace, chengdu

OK so a lot's been happening recently. We decided to stop being blog nerds and go out and gain some experiences (so that we can parlay said experiences into blog form). So 2 nights ago, we went to eat Huo Guo (hotpot), because in Chengdu it's supposed to be especially delicious. Unfortunately, we were raised on nice, Americanized hotpot, where all the ingredients are identifiable and non-threatening (balls of fish, thin vermicelli noodles, cabbage, beef, etc). What we ended up getting looked a little more like this:



We had no idea what any of the ingredients were (most of the time we ask for an English menu, or one with pictures), so we just asked the waitress what she would order. BAD IDEA. First of all, the surrounding ring in the above pic is essentially a lake of fire. This is where they dumped the more aggressively frightening ingredients: snake, sprigs of some weird seasoning that was still on a twig, literally pig brains, etc. I don't want to get too into it because we shot the whole thing and Simon is going to cut the hotpot piece for your entertainment. Suffice it to say that we did not eat like kings.

The next day we go to Le Shan and Mount E Mei, where the biggest Buddha in the world is, carved into a mountain face. Little do we know that it's like a 3 hour hike to the summit, and we hadn't eaten lunch. Also, it's like 98 degrees out and Simon is lugging his 50 pound backpack for some ungodly reason. By the time we actually reach the Buddha, I'm delirious from heatstroke and am mumbling like a shaman and we are so over it that we take 2 pictures and turn immediately around:



The rest of the night is pretty uneventful... except for the fact that we totally went to a Hot Spring and soaked ourselves in boiling water and it was the most relaxing thing in the universe!

Strangely, the standard of living in the E Mei area is very low, everyone is very poor (this guy we met makes literally $1.50 US a day), but all the tourist activities are incredibly expensive. Of course later we find out that if we have a local buy the tickets for all these sight-seeing things we go on we can get everything for WAAAAAY cheaper.

We have been shooting insane amounts of footage, be on the lookout for new videos coming up next week... in the meantime, here's my installment in the Team Vachina Music Video Series: