Today we walked along the river east of our hotel to the Bamboo Park renowned for it's 100 species of bamboo. It is the Monday Long weekend holiday for May 1st People's Day. We have heard that so many Chinese people travel this weekend to be with family that it has had documentaries made about it was the world's largest temporary mass migration. So we decided to stay in Chengdu and went to explore this lovely park. We found a beautiful troop of youth in traditional costumes that would be performing during celebrations in the park posing with some very cute children.
The other name of the park is Wangjiang Tower Park is located by the south bank of Jinjiang River in the east gate of Chengdu. It's 188 acres are famous for its historic relics that commemorate Xue Tao, a famous female poet in Tang Dynasty. She was the daughter of a minor official who moved to Chengdu when it was the ancient capitol of China 618 to 907 AD. Her father died when she was young but she and her literary talents attracted the attention of the Chengdu general and she was registered as a courtesan and entertainer.
Amazingly after his death she was able to live independently and continued writing her peoms, associated with local renowned poets and also made special paper for caligraphy. She produced a large collection of poems, 100 which survive to today.
We wandered around the lovely park and saw many people performing on instruments, drinking tea, playing mahjong, and in a pond area at a tea garden little children were feeding the many gold fish with a baby's drinking bottle on a stick. It was all good until this little fellow decided to bop the little girl over the head with his bottle instead of feeding the fish.
In our wanderings Kelsey and I found a little lake and a surrounding moat. We decided to go for a paddle. For some reason they wouldn't let us go out in the big duck boat but for 30 yuan ($5) we were able to go paddle around for an hour.
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