China Trip - Day 7 - Chengdu - continued again
My stomach settled down enough that I made it out to dinner and the Sichuan Opera this evening. I still have yet to eat at a Sichuan restaurant: for some reason they took us to a Cantonese restaurant today. That was probably a good thing for my stomach, though, so I guess I won't complain that I haven't had real Sichuan food yet.
After dinner we went to the Sichuan Opera. It's not like a western opera in that it's a bunch of smaller performances instead of one long work. We saw hand shadows, stick puppets, and some mini-plays accompanied by music, in addition to the specialties of Sichuan opera, face-changing and fire-breathing:
Sichuan Opera - Firebreather
The fire breathing is pretty self-evident (and photogenic). The face changing involved changing masks (I think as many as 10 over the course of a minute, and it was difficult to tell quite how they accomplished it in most cases. It was an entertaining evening.
Tomorrow we leave for Emei Shan, where I won't have internet access, but where I will hopefully get some pictures of an eclipse. My next blog post will likely be three days from now, but hopefully I'll have a lot of pictures to accompany it...