The Pet Shop

The weather in Chengdu has been amazing. It has been sunny and warm. Saturday afternoon I went outside to enjoy it at the tea house. The picture is of the tea house I usually study at. It looks out over the river. This is a new kind of tea I tried called ji hua. It came with a little bowl of sugar to make it sweet and was very delicious. It was also perfect outdoor swimming weather so after I finished my homework I rode my bike to school to go swimming. It rained again in the night and was cool when I woke up in the morning. Then it got nice again. I had class today, on Sunday. But it went OK. I got my first test back and I did pretty good. Then I went to the sports district of Chengdu to buy a new swimming suit. My old swimming suit strap broke so I had to buy a new one. The swimming suits they have are very weird. Almost all of them have padded boob things and are flowery and weird. So I finally found I normal swimming suit. It is purple and is like my old race suit, meaning only one layer. However, when I got to the pool this afternoon I put it on and discovered that Chinese swimming suits are not designed for my...body type. They have the smallest little butt parts ever! Next time I am either going to have to wear two suits or another bottom part, but I'll make it work. No one else seemed to care or even notice so maybe it wasn't actually that bad.

This afternoon Matt, Deborah, Sunny and I also went to the Pet Store district because Matt and Deborah are thinking about getting fish. If you haven't gathered by now, Chengdu is divided into different shopping districts. There is the foreign district, the electronics district, the pet shop district, the sports store district, the office supply district, and many different kinds of clothes districts, as well as many others. The pet store district is the cutest and saddest thing I have ever seen. They have tons of different kinds of animals all in these little cages. They had puppies that you could hold and pet. This picture is of Sunny and Me holding the sharpe and the beagle. The beagle was my favorite. I just had to keep telling myself "Sarah, you cannot get a dog!" It was weird though, because you would see a store with one each of six different kinds of puppies. The first store we went to had a lab, a beagle, a sharpe, a black poodle, a collie, some sort of tiny tea cup dog, one of those fluffy lap dogs, a terrier, and maybe one or two others. And they are all obviously pure bread too. I haven't seen any mutts in Chengdu yet. What is very popular is dog outfits. I'm thinking about buying one for Wally and Wanda, they would love it. (Wally and Wanda are my best friend's two bulldogs) They also had lots of other animals at the pet store. We saw rabbits, all kinds of mice and hamsters, a chinchilla (from South America), squirrels, chipmunks, birds, tons of fish, turtles, crabs, an iguana, snakes, salamanders, pretty much anything you can think of that is small enough to keep in a small cage. It was just row after row of little shop selling an assortment of animals and/or plants. The plant markets are connected with the pet markets here. They had shops filled with exotic plants from huge leafy plants to little mini cacti and every kind of plant container you could imagine. It was fun to see a new part of the city and after all that I had to stop and get a popsicle...