nded about 10 minutes ahead of time and gotten is luggage faster than you can imagine (my imagination cant handle fast and airport in the same sentence) I managed to let him wait for me about 30 minutes, it was good to see him anyway, and what was even better was to speak Swedish with someone you could actually see. We took a taxi back home and started with unloading all the stuff I had asked him to bring; shirts, warm sweaters, gloves and candy, a lot of candy, mostly liquorice and some chocolate that mom called about to remind me not to let Kaj eat it.We went to have brunch, due to my bad planning I hadn't even had time to have breakfast and dad's flight was so early so he hadn't had any either, at my favourite close-by place, it's actually a hotel but they have a nice Chinese restaurant at the first floor, the restaurant actually covers two floors but it's not nice on the second. Of course dad wanted to have a lot of seafood but with some mistake from my side and quite a bit of reluctance to even order seafood we didn't get any, it was actually an honest mistake, the food was still really great, we managed to get some really nice stuff, and the service was better than it had ever been there before; I think they saw two Americans in us and with dad's age they probably expected a lot of money, not that it makes any difference since tipping doesn't exist here.
I had made some preliminary plans, just thoughts really, for the weekend, and when I laid them out for dad we changed them immediately, he figured if we took a taxi around instead we could shorten the times of my plans so we could actually manage to do something that afternoon, and so we did; I called Jane to help us around and from that point she was what everybody thought she was, our private translator, even though it was not really as professional as everybody thought. We went off to the Panda research base that is in the suburbs in the northeast of Chengdu, just about 20-30 minutes by taxi from my place. Now when I say suburbs I don't mean the American kind of suburb, I have been thinking about this a little and that association is just wrong, suburb just means something that lies around the city, not really part of the city c
ore but 
almost, and I think in most cities in the word that means some kind of semi-city, or almost-city, half city- or town- like buildings and half countryside. The Panda base was quite nice, I saw more pandas than I had expected, and especially more kinds of pandas than I knew there was, that is to say we saw two kinds of pandas; of course the traditional giant panda and also something that is called red panda. Now here is another misconception, the giant panda is not giant at all, it's actually not even big, it's like a larger size dog actually, or a tiny bear, so I was rather disappointed about that, and they are stupid and lazy, the only thing they do is eat and sleep, and one of the teenage ones was just scratching his balls all the time. The red pandas were much cuter, they look like bigger size red raccoons, or maybe something between a fox and a puma, with bear like ears and a long, thick tail.
When we came back we had a short rest back in my apartment and then we met Aaron close to my building and the four of us had dinner. This time got his share of seafood at least; we started with having some barbecue, shaokao (or however it should be written), and dad made his selection of weird fishes and an oyster, I just chose some normal pork, beef and vegetables, after that we had some Chinese dishes and dad got some seafood dish there too, I don't remember what it was and I don't care much either, I still don't like seafood.After dinner we went to Paname and met Lily and Kelly, Bella was also there but she left quite soon, we had some drinks and shared a bottle of wine and then went home not too late, it had been a long exhausting day after all, especially for Kaj.
We had been considering some plan to go to a Leshan, a place that is quite close to Emeimountain where I went last weekend and that has a big Buddha statue, it's said to be VERY big, we changed our mind about that though, that trip would take about 9-10 hours in total and we simply didn't have any energy for it. Instead we stayed home resting just about the whole day, we actually didn't go out until after 5pm when dad had starting to complain about lunch, he probably thought it was around 2pm still. We went out to an area close to my home where there is a monastery and some old style Chinese buildings and a lot of small restaurants, old style and not old; they were actually celebrating the one year anniversary for that area this weekend. I think dad was very happy there, we walked around and tried all sorts of small cheap snacks that we could find, mostly barbecued stuff but also some deep fried dumplings and some fried minced meat in bamboo leafs. When we finally were done with that we went to another area in the south part of the city where they have some nice hot pot restaurants, I had to take dad to hot pot here, and there he got even more seafood, squids and seafood dumplings and I think some shrimp and other stuff, I gave up and just didn't eat it.
We finished our day at a big store where I could recover the so rare bread that I had given dad for breakfast, I got some cheese too and I guess it might be rather interesting for dad to compare prices of whatever and see what kind of weird stuff we have here, the store has lots of imported stuff, that's why we could find bread and cheese there, but of course also local stuff; I think what he found most exciting was, sigh, the seafood; they always sell it fresh here, that is it is still alive when you pick it out, so loads of aquariums with different kinds of weird looking fish and shellfish, dad got the pictures of those but I crashed when we came back home so we never uploaded them to my computer.
Remind me to cut and paste the movies I took with some nice music so I can upload it here.
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