Another Rainy Day in Chengdu

This morning it was raining harder than usual so we decided to spend the day inside at some museums. The first challenge was to get a taxi to actually take us to the museums.  The first taxi we caught told us he was pointing the wrong way and didn't want to turn around and refused to take us. So we crossed the street and were walking up and down the street trying to score a taxi for at least another 30 minutes in the rain. Couldn't get Uber or Didi(Chinese Uber) to work. Uber may not still be operating in Chengdu. I'm not sure. The Didi app seemed to work but it never found us a ride. Finally got a ride and we started out at the Chengdu museum.

Even getting in and out of the museum was a bit of a trial. First the guards decided that my umbrella was too big to bring in but Margaret's was not. They sent me to a building about 50 yards away to check my umbrella. Then they found that Margaret had a banana and two bottles of mosquito repellant. They didn't seem to care about one bottle but had a problem with the banana and the other. They sent her back to the same building I had just left to lock up her banana and one bottle of repellant in a locker.  Eventually we were cleared to enter


We spent a few hours in the exhibits devoted to the recent history of Chengdu. Chengdu seems to have played a central role in many of the key events in recent Chinese history. In 1911 there were protests and riots when the Qing government decided to give the license for developing railroads in Sichuan to foreign investors. Ultimately the protests were put down violently in what was known as the Chengdu Murder or Chengdu Massacre. These early protests against the Qing were the start of both the nationalist uprising that ultimately lead to the overthrow of the Qing and also one of the roots of the communist party in China.  Nearly 40 years later things came full circle when Chengdu was the scene of the last clashes between the communist and nationalists. Shortly after that the nationalist and Chang Kai-Shek left Chengdu for Taiwan and began their time in exile. Interesting that we spent time in the last two nationalist strongholds-Chengdu and Taiwan.

After leaving the Chengdu museum we headed over to the museum of science and technology. This is an old 1960's style building you might call midcentury communist monolithic architecture. Supposed to be big and imposing. Out front was a giant Mao statue. Actually the first we have seen in China. Reviews made it sound like the old museum used to be pretty boring. Full of non interactive displays extolling the virtues of the communist government and its accomplishments. The museum was closed over a year ago and reopened recently. Now it is awesome. Full of interactive exhibits on mathematics, mechanics, electricity, optics, robotics and all kinds of other stuff. We spent several hours here and stayed right up until they closed. Once they close the guards sweep through the place and kick everyone out within minutes.

After that we headed over to Chunxi street and Jinshi square. This a huge pedestrian mall surrounded by multiple huge shopping malls.  They even have a giant panda bear climbing the side of one mall, sort of like the giant blue bear we have in Denver.  We were looking for a specific underground mall we had heard about that supposedly had hundreds of food stalls, each no much bigger than a minivan. Eventually we found it 2 stories underneath one of the shopping malls. It was a maze of little passages lined with stalls selling noodles, dumplings, sausages, seafood, desserts and all sorts of food. Like a night market in Taiwan but 2 stories underground. Margaret tried a couple of different things from several different stalls. I had fried rice with clams. Syd had some sort of dessert with jelly, fruit, taro and tapioca balls. Amazingly none of us got terribly sick although Margaret's stomach may have been a bit off the next day.