Profile
Blog
Photos
Videos
Week 4
So I am now losing track of what day we are on, so am going to scrap the days.
At the end of last week we got our train to Chengdu, did I mention another 16 hours on a hard sleeper. Walked to the platform and was walking past loads of empty carriages and then we got to ours…..!! Packed like sardines again!! Great!! And not only that, there are two speakers in the whole of carriage, again we got lucky and got stuck by it again!! Not great at 8am in the morning on extra loud!
Eventually pulled into the station we got our gear and headed to find a taxi to the hostel.
Again like the other places we have visited everything is built up , with really high buildings and high apartment blocks. It seems more built up then London.
Arrived at the lazy bones hostel a little later, checked in and dropped our things off in the room.
Later that evening we headed out to a reggae bar and met a Chinese girl who later became our tour guide around Chengdu.
We ended up staying in Chengdu for 10 days as we wanted to do a three gorges trip and the cheapest we could find was the following Wednesday so we stuck around till then. The 10 days went pretty quick.
We spent a few days with the Chinese girl who took us by bus to see the panda's. It was a great experience seeing the Panda's, some were sleeping and then we saw some of them being feed.
We also made our way to the nursery and saw some baby panda's they are the cutest thing I have ever seen. However as anything in China is packed with Chinese tourists so a lot of pushing and shoving had to be done so that I could take a few pictures of the baby panda's…unbelievable!
The rest of the days we just spent looking around Chengdu, as well as trying a hot pot, which is a basically a burner in the middle of the table, two compartments are filled with spicy water and the other two with normal spice. All you do is cook off the raw meat in one of these pots and then once cooked you mix it into your own small bowl, which consists of oil, coriander, oyster sauce. Then you just eat it. The raw food consisted of pigs brain (which I didn't try), ducks blood, beef, rolled beef (looked like ham) ducks intestine, potatoes, lotus flower, noodles, shrimp, mushrooms, quail eggs.
I tried everything except the pigs brain, the ducks blood was strange tasted like jelly but a strange taste.
Later we went to an old part of town which had all the old houses still standing, some were converted in shops whilst others were made into restaurants, but was great to see the old homes and architecture. Also apparently the more steps outside the house meant that the owners were wealthy.
We also had to move hostels half way through the week as there was not enough space so we checked into their sister company, 'mix hostel'. Seemed a better location as there was more places to eat and monastery nearby. We wandered around the monastery part and found stalls around there. Az brought a bracelet with a grain of rice, which the lady wrote onto. So I brought a grain of rice too and had it put into a small jar. Sounds strange, but amazing that the lady could write on it.
The rest of the week we just wandered about went to a Halloween party. Basically a street was covered in Halloween decoration and all the bars and clubs also. People were dressed up and walking about in their costumes trying to scare people. Was a great atmosphere. Found a bar that was made into a typical English pub, with a fake red bus on the outside and a red telephone box inside. Felt like being somewhere in the UK.
Chengdu is a built up city, again with about a 20 million population. So as you can imagine so far in my trip everywhere you go it's packed with people, bikes, cars, electric bikes everywhere. You basically just have to cross a road, by basically just deciding and just keep walking, anything will manoeuvre out the way…it's a crazy country. People are not important on the roads over here. You have to give way on zebra crossings and also to bikes and bicycles….. Bizarre.
Apparently the food in Chengdu is of the Sichuan province, which means it's the best food in the whole country, as it is the spiciest which people like, however I have to say I don't think it is. I preferred the northern food more and also food in Xian.
- comments