... And the living is easy

We had last week off school for something called "Sports Week" (So, you play sports all week, I asked skeptically. Like basketball and stuff? Not really, they said. So what do you do? We do a lot of running, they said. That's it? Well, we do some jumping, too ... And I left it at that.)

So Brendan and I hopped a 24-hour train to Chengdu, where we were immediately befriended by a bald-headed, bare-bottomed toddler who ate our food, made off with my phone and took huge delight in shooting us repeatedly dead with an extremely pimped out toy gun while his mother looked on fondly.

Several hundred hands of gin rummy later, we arrived to begin a culinary odyssey that included a foray into Tex-Mex, Indian, and French (where the staff appeared a little taken aback when we fell into slightly unseemly paroxysms of ecstasy over the baguette), as well as many more rounds of cards at riverside tea houses.

We spent three days climbing the stunningly steep Emei Shan, being stalked by monkeys and staying in damp monasteries where the monks paid no nevermind to traditional sleeping hours when it came to drumming and chanting. The lush scenery was the Pacific Northwest on steroids.

I don't want to once again focus on pancakes as a travel highlight, but imagine hiking for hours up a mountain, to turn a corner and run into a little shack with a sign that reads "Hard Wok Cafe," (run by the excessively delightful Betty and her ex-Army chef husband), and serving up banana pancakes. Really, there are no words.

Below: Brendan sends mixed messages to our simian stalkers (who shadowed us up the mountain and repeatedly launched sneaky sorties in an attempt to separate me from the herd, showing a keen eye for Darwinian strategizing), alternately menacing them with a stick and exchanging high fives with the smallest of the bunch.