Chengdu - The Long Walk & Adventures at Pizza Hut
Rob had the idea that to help us prepare for Hau Shan we should take a long walk. Several hours long. I agreed and the next morning we set out reasonably early for the Green Ram Temple. That was the destination we picked as our turn around point. Getting there was a long walk, but not really a problem since all we had to do really was follow the ring road (because a lot of the cities were once fortified towns, many have a central city area, surrounded by a ring road, surrounded by the urban sprawl). It was a temple, basically like every temple we’d been to already. Rob got some pictures, but I didn’t.
The problems started when we headed back. We had decided that instead of going back along the ring road, we were going to follow the river/canal. This seemed like an excellent idea: it would be a much prettier walk, and it was also the long way around by a little bit. We cut through people’s park (which was quite pretty and in retrospect I really wish we’d stuck around and explored) and found the river. Which you cannot, in fact, walk along. We had a map with us, so this wasn’t a problem. We looked at where we were, plotted a course back, and headed that way.
The map of Chengdu we had named the bigger roads - not the hutongs and small streets - and in Chinese cities the names of the roads often changes every few blocks. So finding yourself on a map by looking at what street or crossroad you are on is a lot more difficult than you would expect. Than I expected anyway. It didn’t help that my directional sense is apparently totally dependant on landmarks and doesn’t work for shit in completely unfamiliar places. We got pretty thoroughly lost in about half an hour and I was so turned around that I kept thinking we were going the wrong way. Which understandably frustrated my husband a bit after a while.
We wandered for probably close to an hour and eventually wandered into what I think was a “nicer” neighborhood. Where some kind soul who spoke English saw our confusion (and our open map) and asked if we needed help. He showed us where we actually were on the map (not too terribly far from where we thought, but far enough that we’d have wandered for quite a while longer before finding a main road), and we made our way back to the hostel.
All in all, our long walk took nearly six hours. For the latter half the temps were already in the 90’s. I was a little sunburned, and a little cranky. So Rob gave me no argument when I suggested we stop a block short of the hostel for food.
Pizza hut in China is not like Pizza Hut at home. We know it as a place to order cheap pizza if you don’t mind the grease. Here it is an actual restaurant - a very nice restaurant. They serve cocktails, pasta, seafood, steaks, and yes, also pizza. We were seated and I ordered a blueberry fruit smoothie thing (which was delicious and truly cold, a novelty in China) while we figured out what we wanted. Thank gods for picture menus! We decided to order personal pizzas. Now their menu only showed four options for personal pizzas, and of those the only one that didn’t have something I don’t like on it was the cheese pizza. No problem! Surely they’ll add pepperoni or black olives for me right? No. Wrong. Thanks for playing. You don’t adjust the menu items at Pizza Hut in China. The expectation/reality mismatch rears it’s ugly head again. I took a few deep breaths after ordering the plain cheese personal pizza, and managed to put the cranky aside. We were, after all, sitting in a lovely air-conditioned space, and I did have a delicious, cold, blueberry thingy to drink. The pizzas came and they were thankfully entirely in keeping with Pizza Hut pizza in the states. And this would be the end of the story (yay! Food!), except for two children.
Babies in China do not wear diapers. Or underpants of any kind for that matter. They wear pants that are split up the middle so they can simply squat wherever they are, and go.
On the one hand, the pants themselves are possibly a good thing - why train the baby to go in their “pants” and then have to train them out of it? - but on the other, going wherever seems to translate to going everywhere. And that is not ok. Especially when they get to be six or seven and still go anywhere they want.
Here’s how this relates. I was sitting facing the glass outside door, and halfway through my pizza a little boy (six or seven) got the girl at the door to let him out. He took two steps out the door, pulled out his junk, and peed on the sidewalk right outside the door, laughing the whole time. Then he came back in and it was like nothing had just happened. Think about this for a minute - we’re in a restaurant (which has bathrooms), at a mall (which has even more bathrooms), and the parents just sent their kid out the front door to pee on a highly trafficked spot on the sidewalk. Ew. I told Rob (since he was facing the wrong way to have seen it and I was too speechless while it was happening to point it out) and told him I wasn’t leaving through that door. And I wouldn’t have either, except for the other kid.
The second child had either stuffed himself too full, or wasn’t feeling well to begin with. As we were waiting for our change, he puked on the table (in the food) and then on the floor. I didn’t see this - Rob told me not to turn around after he saw it and then told me why. So now I had a choice: out the door with the evaporating pee puddle or past the puke to leave through the mall.
I went out the door.