Sim’s Cozy Guesthouse
I arrived in Chengdu last night, and I’m staying in the nicest hostel I have ever stayed in. It’s right in the city but there are gardens and patios and a restaurant and a travel desk that fixed my pronunciation of place names, to the extent it will ever be fixed, and they leave bananas and a peach in your room when you check in and they pour big shots of Chinese date whiskey for 80 cents, and you can recline on cushions, eat your Szechuan food, drink your date whiskey, and read _Journey to the West_, which is what I’m reading (look up Arthur Waley, _Monkey_ on Amazon if you want the scoop), and there are KITTENS, and I have arrived in the Western Pure Land of backpacking. But many of the day trips out of the city that I was interested in turn out to be to places that suffered hard during the earthquake, so I’ll probably been here just a few days and then head north. Now I’ve finished my steamed buns and I’m off to the local Buddhist temple, and to find some shaving cream and hand sanitizer stuff to replace the bottles that airport security in Beijing confiscated (they took all the transparent containers and left all the opaque containers out of my bathroom baggie. But they did it in a very friendly, professional, Olympics-ready sort of way. Olympics-ready they are. The immigration official had a little electronic gadget in front of him with light-up stars where I could rate his service.)
