Steve's China Blog

Monday, March 14, 2011

Big plate of chicken and a trip

Last weekend the weather started getting a little chilly again. My friend Cindy and I met up with Reese and Anson to go out for some DaPanJi. Cindy had never had DaPanJi before, so she was really looking forward to it. Actually, it seems like a long time since I've had DaPanJi, since my first choice with the cold damp weather of Chengdu in the winter is hotpot.

The restaurant is a little XinJiang food place near a medical college here in Chengdu. Reese sent me the address of the college in Chinese on my phone, so I could show it to the taxi driver, since I could not remember where it was. The taxi driver dropped me off at one of the gates of the college, but it was not the right one, so I ended up asking a student passing by for help finding the gate. She was nice enough to walk with me to where I needed to go. I offered to buy her dinner in exchange for her help, but she had to study and could not join us for dinner.

The DaPanJi was very good. We also had a spicy fried fish dish and some lamb kabobs. We had hoped to have some flat bread also, but they were out. Cindy enjoyed the dinner a lot. She also enjoyed meeting Reese and Anson.

A few weeks ago I realized that I had not traveled anywhere tropical in all of 2010. The week before last and this week I have been trying to arrange a trip to Thailand for early April.

At first I was thinking of going to Mauritius, but the airfare from Chengdu to there is really expensive! The price was fluctuating between around $4,000USD to a little over $7,000USD for round trip tickets. Then I thought about going to Maldives, but Maldives seems too romantic of a place to go to by myself, and there wasn't enough time to find someone to go with me. So after looking around at a bunch of other places I decided to go back to Phuket in Thailand.

I used a travel agency here in Chengdu and we finally got all the flight and resort reservation completed yesterday. They were not too efficient, but after everything got put together I found that my airfare would be half the price of what it would be if I had booked it online with an American travel agency. Nice! Now I need to figure out where I put my sunscreen.

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