We’re baaaaaaccckk! 🙂
We came home Saturday with tired feet and SO MANY pictures. Thousands of stairs were climbed during our mini-vacay to Leshan and Emeishan, but Ari will regale you with those adventures later in the week.
The Teddy Bear Hotel. Image courtesy of http://www.booking.com/
Today, I wanted to share with you some of the wonderful hospitality we experienced during the voyage! Our accommodations were the Teddy Bear Hotel, a hostel at the base of Emeishan (Mount Emei). It came highly recommended by both Tripadvisor and Ctrip (Chinese Tripadvisor), so we went for it! This was my first experience staying in a hostel (I was a little deterred by a certain scary movie…) but Tripadvisor/Ctrip did not lead us astray, the Teddy Bear Hotel was amazing!
For one, the staff spoke English, which was a nice break from the on-going communication struggle. Also, they had hamburgers and French fries on their menu! We all indulged in these items as well as cold Coca-Colas and fried bananas with chocolate for dessert…YUM! It’s funny how much we miss cold beverages…
Anyway, other aspects of the Teddy Bear Hotel that we enjoyed were the cleanliness, nearby massage parlor and large recreation room! There were plenty of activities to fill our down time between adventures. While all of the aforementioned attributes were great, the main highlight of the Teddy Bear Hotel was probably the proprietor, who introduces himself as Andy. He is very knowledgeable about the mountain, travel times, costs, etc. and is more than willing to share stories while helping you plan your day(s) in Emeishan! Upon returning from our day on the mountain, he greeted us with a smiling face and inquired about our day while we waited for our piping hot, delicious Sichuan meal (one day of burgers was enough to satiate our craving for America).
Found a spot to sign on the ceiling!
In short, if you ever find yourselves in Emeishan, be sure to stay at the Teddy Bear Hotel!
Now that we’ve discussed the Teddy Bear, you probably want to hear a little about the panda bears! We were all very excited and happy to be back with the pandas! They did a little moving around while we were away, and we were welcomed back by the usual breeding center dwellers (Wu Gang, Su Shan, Zhuang Mei and the gang) as well as two newbies, Mei Xi and Cui Cui. We are excited to get to know these new girls, and hopefully have some more successful matings soon!
Mei Xi is very vicious 🙂
Cui Cui was not in the mood for pictures this morning.
-Alyssa