10/12/98: We couldn’t go through China without stopping to see Pandas. So today we took a tour to a panda refuge about an hour out of town… We met a fellow traveler from Chicago yesterday, so he joined us. Howard has been going for about seven months also, but he has stayed here in Asia the entire time… Then our next train ride, onward… Most crowded train experience yet, if you don’t push back a bit, you get trampled… We had to share our compartment with a curmudgeonly Chinese man who was unfriendly, slurped his soup noisily, then unashamedly burped, farted and picked his teeth. And he snored so loudly that we got no sleep… Social etiquette is different here…
NOTE: The photo above shows a giant panda housed in a sanctuary in Chengdu, China.
