Chengdu, Day 1.

It's 8:30 pm and I can barely stay awake. We finished at the camps today around 5 and I've been in my room ever since. I'm going to try to convince myself to go out tomorrow night since I have a hard time imagining any reason I'll be back in Chengdu, ever.

After a highly questionable Chinese food experience earlier today, I decided to play it ultra safe and order kid food from the menu: cheese pizza and french fries. I should have known something was up when room service called me back to confirm that all I wanted on my cheese pizza was, well, cheese. Normally that would have been a strange question, but this is China where the vegetarian spicy bean curd includes something shark fin-esque (but delicious nonetheless), the fried tofu and vegetables is doused in tiny pork pieces (so not doing that) and the vegetarian vegetable rolls are wrapped in something suspiciously like an oscar mayer hot dog casing (OMG. Help.). Oh, and the "Margarita" pizza on the menu here at the Sheraton has "assorted" seafood on it.

I really did order this. Bad me.

So, anyhow, the food comes and, as you can see from the above documentation, it looks like all is well in the land of greasy Western food. But when I bit into the pizza I realized what the phone call meant: NO SAUCE! I couldn't even muster up a tiny bit of indignation though, because the fact that they eliminated something from the dish to suite my alleged wishes- and brought me an apple-was so unexpected and so refreshing that I practically welled up. So, I ate a little bit of everything (ok, a lot of the fries), drank a Tsingtao and watched the Bruce Lee biopic with Lauren Holly.

The depth of my cultural explorations startles even me.
---------
Today was also the first day of research at the hoops camps. I took a few photos and this one, of a kid resting in the 1,000,000 heat is probably my favorite:

This is why I love my job.