Born In My Heart

October 15, 2010 Panda Breeding and Research Center

Kai slept well last night in the ‘pack-n-play’ bed we have in our room. It took housekeeping 35 minutes to bring it to us last night because they had to “fix it”. This is a 4 star hotel, yet they only have 2 baby beds! Kai was breathing 60 times a minute for a long time. It seems a bit fast to me, but his color was good. He sure does sweat a lot. I’m not as worried about that because my friend Brenda, who has a little Hunan spicy girl, told me once that she sweats too.

I love watching this baby sleep. He is so beautiful. He has beautiful long eyelashes. He has full lips that do not quite come together in the center when he sleeps. He has great hair too. It is so black, I love it! It is so weird to me that he is finally mine. I still touch him and think to myself, this is not a doll, he is mine! I love to touch his little arm and hand while he is sleeping.

This morning we went to breakfast and it was mediocre. We were in a bit of a hurry anyway. I went to run the shower and we got light straw colored water coming out. I made sure that Roger knew to keep his mouth closed. Last thing we need is to get sick after being here for 24 days with no issues what so ever.

We were pretty excited because we are going to the Panda Research and Breeding Center. This leg of our trip added quite a bit to the trip, so we were hoping for the best. We get there and it was pretty good, just not what we expected. Kai was asleep during our visit to the Safari Park in Guangzhou, when we looked at the pandas. This time we made sure he stayed awake. We did get to see two month old pandas. They were sleeping and you could not take pictures of them, but they were so cute! I loved being able to talk to Kai and tell him about the little babies who were obviously dreaming.

I wanted to stay at the park all day, but I don’t think our guide had that in mind since we only spent less than 2 hours there. I am really into research. I love zoology. This is my kind of trip, but I want to know what they are researching and how their research is going. I was not able to get that deep into it. Basically, we just looked at pandas. We had already looked at pandas in Guangzhou - this was not the experience that I read about on their website. Next time, I would go without a guide. I don’t like feeling constrained about time.

After we finished at the park, our driver and guide dropped us off at a Sichuan restaurant where we had some real Sichuan food. It was pretty good - a bit spicy, but this is how I like it. We went walking around with the baby a bit later and found some interesting shops and multiple food vendors. These vendors cook off the back of their bikes! We decided we would be adventurous and try some kind of skewered meat that they cooked in front of us. Then the meat was brushed with wet red spice (possible oil based) that has pepper seed in it, and it was then dusted with some sort of dry red spice that was HOT! It was so good though! I think they made it less spicy since we were Caucasian. We also picked up some French fry looking potatoes that were spicy also, but not too bad. Some bites were pretty hot. Kai insisted on having a few bites and it was so funny to see the face he made when eating the spicy food. Even his eyes watered! He was even asking for more. I called him my Sichuan baby!

So, we were worried about the reception here in Chengdu, but I have to say that it has been the warmest so far. People on the street smile and talk to him all the time! When we were eating the spicy food on the street, we saw a pretty 30 something petite woman with her cute ~6-7 year old daughter. They stopped in front of us and she was pointing at Kai, then Roger and I. She had a smile on her face the whole time. She told her daughter to say Nihao to Kai. When she saw us smiling back at her, she told her daughter to say Hello to us! The cute happy little girl said loudly waving her hand “hallo!” It was so cute! I could tell that she was happy we adopted Kai. We are glad we adopted this little guy too!

Photographs of the street food vendor and the HOT food