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china 2025!!
Background
um hi <3 i’ve been wanting to get back into writing dreamwidth posts again and thought this adventure was a great way to get back into it. APOLOGIES IN ADVANCE FOR MY PHOTOGRAPHY SKILLS it’s called living in da moment or whatever. you may notice crazier and crazier collages as you progress thru this...yeah i was getting tired
To no one’s surprise, this was my first time going to china (and my first trip to asia since 2019…). Kevin had some errands to run there so we decided to make a vacation out of it. There was a lot of preparation going in advance…the main things being:
I was really saved by the Circle to Search feature on my phone that would let me translate anything on my screen, especially when using Meituan. It took a bit of back and forth to get into a good flow of translating, selecting options, scroll, translating, but once I figured it out it was 10000x better than the WeChat translate feature!
Going into this trip I was really nervous about my Gastro Issues and Problems coming up. But other than that I was looking forward to it, esp to see the city where Kevin was born hehe. The only reference I had to prepare myself was to think of India LOL but boy was I wrong…I did work really hard on planning things and making sure we had everything prepared beforehand because I knew once we arrived I would be total dead weight. Literally I asked Kevin if there were any Chinese phrases I should learn and after looking into it a bit they were just like “Just stick with me and you’ll be fine”. Like okay <3 awesomesauce <3
Beijing
Sunday 4/6
Our flight there was pretty uneventful. I watched The Wild Robot and CRIED for some reason even though tbh…I did not like it much in retrospect. Stories about legacy and doing better for The Next Generation really get to me but I found the ending a bit roundabout and too easy. Both of my flight meals were near identical pasta dishes which like honestly…not bad for vegetarian flight food, though certainly not seasoned at all! Much better than the nasty piece of work i got on my flight to london last year…
When we arrived i was immediately shocked by how quiet it was. I thought there would be endless cars honking at each other (bc that’s what india is like from my distant memory…they just be honking!) but it was not so. It was certainly smoggy, and the scent of cigarette smoke was everywhere. There were so many gorgeous flowering trees, but other than that it seemed like the landscape was a bit sparse. My favorite was the golden weeping willow (i believe), its leaves looked almost like they were painted on by rough brushstrokes…
I got a wee honeydew tea from a vending machine (kevin: they did not have vending machines when i last visited in 2017! Me: that’s #infrastructure) to both refresh myself (teehee) and also test alipay (worked. awesome). We had a bit of confusion ordering our first didi but through the power of wandering around a bit, we made our way to our hotel! What’s funny is that this was the least fancy hotel we stayed in during this trip, but somehow my favorite…adequate room and bathroom space are important to me!
A cool street in the area...
Our hotel was in wangfujing which is a swanky neighborhood but a little…hrm…boring to me. We went to a restaurant (圣达小馆) and i got this smoky tofu dish that got me feeling kind sick unfortunately but there were also chilled cucumber/jelly noodles (cucumber lapi 黄瓜拉皮) that i enjoyed a lot. Kevin got a lamb dish but found it on the oilier side. We then wandered around the HUGE fancy street there (Wangfujing street itself), with a plethora of designer stores, and I saw my first 3D corner digital billboard.
Food stuffs
In hindsight I think every 3D billboard thing we saw was of a panda...
Monday 4/7
Woke up at 6 (easy to do thanks to jetlag) to go to the great wall at mutianyu. We hired a driver through our hotel who took us there, waited for us, and took us back. We ended up cancelling the tickets we ordered through the site, and got some through the driver and a travel group he was associated with, which saved us a little bit of money. We took the gondola up, bc i am not walking up just to walk even more on the wall itself... There were not many people there, and the wait time was negligible!
The walk was honestly…kinda rough LOL. the hero’s slope…oh my god…it’s basically a vertical slope at the end, and thank god we went early in the morning because otherwise it would have been so hot with little shade. It had me wondering…have people died trying to climb this?? Bc i could easily imagine someone falling on these vertical stairs and then rolling all the way down. My legs were trembling uncontrollably on the walk back but it was really satisfying to get there even though the view was like. The same as at any other point on the wall. They said that you are not a man until you climb hero’s slope….well i did it lads. It wasn’t super lush/green when we went, i suppose due to early spring, but there were some pretty white flowering trees on the mountainside.
So many cats on the way up to the wall...it seems like a rough life ):
Gondola! It would "launch" with such frightening speed...
When we got out it was also soooo crowded like everyone and their mother was lined up waiting to get in. So thankful we got there early, i think it’s a necessity if you don’t want to wait in line all day + have a million people in your photos. It was on the walk back to the car that i had my first fated interaction with tanghulu…why is it SO DELICIOUS?? We walked by it on the way up and kevin was like “ah i bet this is the shoddy tourist stuff and the prices are scalped” and then on the way back they were like “FUCK IT im just gonna buy you one” and honestly i feel like it was the best tanghulu i had on the whole trip. I had the strawberry kind, and i’m not sure WHAT they put in their strawberries (perhaps the strawberries are soaked in sugar water???), but it was so fucking good and i was thinking about it for the rest of the trip. Maybe the post-hero’s slope exhaustion/my lactic acid soaked muscles enabled me to enjoy Brilliant Strawberry Sugar Treat to the utmost…My skewer eating skills were shoddy though and i did have sugar on my face quite often though. oops!
We had the driver drop us off at a Peking duck restaurant (盛福年烤鸭店·故宫点). Kevin had a really awesome experience while I ate more cold jelly cucumber noodles, which certainly has restorative properties! I also ate a warm vegetable dish. It was funny because when we were served, after kevin explained i was vegetarian, they put a piece of duck in my bowl which made me go (?_?), but then Kevin told me that a lot of vegetarians in china aren’t full vegetarian, and are usually vegetarian for health reasons but are okay with eating meat occasionally, or “trying” meat once in certain situations. The Peking duck came with haw pieces and blueberry jam in addition to the normal green onion and sweet bean sauce (甜面酱) which i found very interesting. The service was super great as well, the waiter came over to use his phone flashlight to light up the scene when he saw Kevin taking a photo of me/our food, and he gave us extra complimentary mango haw snack at the end as we were leaving…so kind…he also gave us this tasty lemon mint…
We then went to the Best boba place in Beijing according to dianping called Koi Thé, and got these cream cheese drinks with tapioca pearls. I got grape and kevin got mango. Kevin’s was SOOOO GOOD like that particular variety of mango that’s not the sour kind that is usually used in american mango bevvies…rather it is something creamy and sweet and delicate and almost floral...WOW. the pearls itself were okay, didn’t have the right level of chew to them. It was here that we began to learn that it is rather american of us to get boba for the Toppies. More on that Later. Because boba/milk tea is so cheap we were very determined to get BOBA EVERY DAY. B.E.D.!
Other than that, not much to note on this day…we chilled in a variety of malls, and there were sooo many of them!
Later on, we grabbed some pastries to eat for breakfast the next day, i tried some haw tanghulu (strawberry is still my fave), and we grabbed some street food (小吃 xiaochi) to eat back at the hotel. I got some 卤 (braised) beancurd and lotus and wosun and enoki mushroom and i really liked the lotus…crunchy and fun. Kevin got some rabbit.
Tuesday 4/8
We had tiananmen square and forbidden city planned for this day! We had to wait in line in multiple lines, one to get through tiananmen square which took forever. It was funny because they look through your bag in security and the guard did not know what anything i had was lol. She was investigating my sunscreen stick + hand sanitizer spray and as kevin explained everything to her she kept calling it all very high tech lmao. Tiananmen square was HUGE and we walked through it pretty fast to get to forbidden palace…which was also SO BIG. we didn’t even go through it all because 2/3rds of the way through, it was like 3pm and we needed to get some food. To be honest i found it a bit underwhelming/plain inside but there were some fun stone + terracotta sculptures that I enjoyed a lot. They had some lovely lilacs too, but otherwise the garden was rather simple, though maybe it was too early in the season. I learned a lot about Emperor Qianlong, the ultimate mother lover as well.
Woman listening to music stone figure :3c
Afterwards, we went to this zhajiangmian place (方砖厂69号炸酱面·烤鸭) for a late lunch! Apparently it has a michelin bib, which is inexpensive + easily made but still good? Anyways, kevin had zhajiangmian(not vegetarian) and i ordered sesame noodles instead which was nice because it had a variety of textures and tasted good and filled me up. Kevin got this speciality plate that came with more toppings and shared them with me so I was lost in the sesame sauce. It was quite good and we also got sesame marinated cabbage that was so crunchy and fun and tasted exactly like apples with peanut butter to me both texturally and taste wise. I also learned that cold drinks in China are not that cold…we ordered an arctic soda (mandarin flavored) and though it was in the fridge it was warm.
Amazing… afterwards i horfed down another strawberry tanghulu in 2 minutes before our didi arrived to take us to lama temple which i THOROUGHLY enjoyed and kevin made fun of me for it! sorry for having a religious background n then essentially leaving it but also missing temples because i haven’t been in ages! It is nice that they give you complimentary incense…it smelled sooo nice to me and i basically stood around for a long time just smelling and looking around, the smoke scent was everywhere and you could pick it up from blocks away. There was a very tall buddha statue, which I was not expecting to be as tall as it was! i always feel inherently awkward at churches/non hindu temples/etc but it was still a very nice and peaceful experience.
After that, we walked to another tanghulu place (I think it was 地安门冰糖葫芦) and i got to try a bunch of different types! One with goldenberry (姑娘果 guniangguo) which tasted exactly like jalebi to me, and another with haw + glutinous rice, and another strawberry one…yeah strawberry is still my fave, but they were all tasty. We walked with our tanghulu over to jingshan park, which had an awesome view as it overlooked the forbidden city.
We took a didi to get boba near our hotel at No Yeye No Tea (爷爷不泡茶) which i think was maybe my favorite milk tea place this whole trip…kevin got a cherry blossom special with jelly and a bunch of other stuff and it was so good to me. I can’t even remember what i got, i think a simple osmanthus or oolong milk tea, and that also had a lovely tea flavor! Then we were quite tired and went to bed. Amazing being able to drink a milk tea at 8pm and still be able to sleep.
Wednesday 4/9
Our final day in beijing! We took a didi over to the summer palace which i found striking…the scale of it is so amazing! I kinda hyped it up in my head a lot because when we were planning our trip kevin kept mentioning how empress dowager cixi bankrupted china to reconstruct/enlarge the summer palace instead of building the navy up and then that enabled britain to attack and it got damaged again lol. So i was likely surely this place is AWESOME if it bankrupted china, to which kevin was like wouldn’t that mean it’s the OPPOSITE of awesome? Bc they ran out of money? But anyways, I do think it lived up to its reputation, just seeing how vast everything was, and it was fun to ferry across the lakes and such. Unfortunately, i think by this point i was getting really tired of just walking, and it was crowded, so after visiting some of the temples/seeing the stone boat, we decided to dip and get lunch…
We went to a 2 michelin star vegetarian restaurant called King’s Joy! It was very impromptu because i had been wanting to go to an all vegetarian restaurant at some point on this trip and then i saw this recommended online so we just went even though we didn’t have a reservation and were wearing busted ass tourist clothes scream. There were roughly 15 courses? My favorites were the clay pot wild mushroom peach resin stew (fun textures and a very comforting taste that kind of reminded me of simple lentil dishes), candied mulberry + wild mulberry liquor (basically mulberry tanghulu which ofc i was gonna love + the mulberry baijiu left a pleasant warm feeling in my belly) + the bamboo braised rice casserole (the sticky rice was a fun texture and it came with these moreish pickled veggies). The osmanthus milk pudding dessert was also creamy and delicious! It was a fun experience overall. It felt a bit Too fancy for me (the kind of place where there are attendants in the bathroom to guide you to a stall, and then as soon as you’re done, they go in after you to flush again and make sure it’s clean + hand you a towel after you are done washing your hands…) and overall the food was good but not the Best fine dining experience i had, only because there was a lot of repetition between courses (lots of mushroomy things with mild flavors). But i can finally say i’ve been to a michelin restaurant at least, and a vegetarian one at that! This accounted for like ½ of the vacation spending lmao.
The pickled veggies + mushroom rice dish, mushroom peach resin stew, milk pudding
We then took a didi (with a driver who kevin said was really rude + thought i was turkish lmao) and went to the temple of heaven. We didn’t spend long there because i think we were just burnt out…there wasn’t that much to see and dogwood (?) pollen kept flying into my face here. After many failed attempts to locate either A suitably stocked jellycat store (even FAO Schwarz was meh) OR An archery store, we gave up and tried Chagee milk tea (霸王茶姬) (which neither of us liked!!! Too creamy!!! Though they did have the coolest cup design + ongoing nezha collab lol). Then went back to the hotel to massage our feets and pack!
Chengdu
Thursday 4/10
We got to the airport soooooooooo early, and just sat around sweating. Had a mediocre brunch type meal at this airport restaurant but they did have a delicious, thick, creamy yogurt. Overall, the yogurt in china is really nice, and i believe the milk is ultra pasteurized so it’s better if you are lactose intolerant. Our travel agency told us there wouldn’t be a meal served on our 12:55 PM flight but there WAS…when Kevin told them I couldn’t eat it because I was vegetarian, the flight hostesses pulled a vegetarian meal out of their OWN lunch man i felt so bad…but why was it actually the best flight meal i have ever had! even though it was just Rice, bok choy, and mushroom??? It came with this “hainan special sauce” that was SOOO good to me. It also came with yam cakes that were pretty yummy…delightful
The temperature difference was astounding…immediately started sweating as we got out of the plane. Unsure how people are able to walk around in jeans and a sweater in 86*F weather but i really respect that. I have horrible temperature regulation so just had to make do…i couldn’t style my hair at all in chengdu tbh because it would just get instantly frizzy. i also noticed how green chengdu is <3 it is so gorgeous to drive into from the airport, really lush hills and farms.
Our hotel was quite nice, though a bit cramped, and close to the city center! We went on a really crazy journey to the New Century Global Center which gave the vibes of the most haunted mall in existence. Somehow we could not find the main entrance so we walked through this covered waterpark area that was basically abandoned…devoid of water or children or joy, just dark and desolate set pieces and the occasional couple sitting at an otherwise empty food court table. I thought I was going to be hunted for sport…
CREEPY!
Once we finally got to the mall proper, the first thing i saw was a tanghulu stand (NICE! It funny bc the day we left beijing i kept desperately asking kevin if they have tanghulu in the south and they were like erm it’s a northern speciality so maybe not??? But they do have it…unfortunately it’s not as good but still suffices) and then we also tried Cha Panda/Tea ByDo. i got a pomelo and mango coconut milk drink that was unfortunately way too bitter for me <3 we milled around the mall a bit. It was sooooooooooo big, and it’s crazy because it feels like each individual mall has stores that exist nowhere else…just stores popping up out of the ether. Some kind of crazy cosmic energy in these malls.
We then took a didi to a sichuanese duck place (张烤鸭·青石桥店). I got eggplant made vegetarian (鱼香茄子) and it was SOOO DELICIOUS. super gingery…i wish i could have scooped up the leftover sauce and eaten it with rice but i was trying to be very careful this whole trip about not destroying my stomach with too much oil/pepper/spice sigh but it was so good and the eggplant was crispy and chewy and not too oily either tbh! Thinking of her… They served us some pickled veggies to eat it with and wow. I was feeling Good. Honestly the food in chengdu overall was muchhhhhhhhhh better to my tastes…it was also fun to hear kevin conversing with people in sichuanese now instead of mandarin :3 (as if my ass could tell the different for real but i think i was starting to pick up on subtleties, and kevin did explain the differences to me as well).
Most busted photo of yummy eggplant + sichuan style duck dish
Friday 4/11
Sanxingdui day babieee time to explore some bronze age relics! Our hotel had a bus outside that took us there and it took roughly 90 minutes. It was SOOO COOL the level of detail people were able to commit to with these masks…the whole time i kept saying “wow this is literally case of the golden idol….mask of the golden idol….case of the golden mask…” (video game brain). So endeared to the huge gallery of masks they had where each had different facial features…I wonder, who are you supposed to be? Someone with a long nose, someone with thick eyebrows, or a shorter chin. It felt very special…
one of the figurines looked like Angry Pig...
The funnest part for me was this random VR experience we did there. TBH i did not want to do it because i was scared i was gonna be motion sick (and i was! I was!) but it was soooo goofy. The audio was completely in chinese so kevin just translated for me throughout. But we were being so silly because you could see other player’s hands in the VR so i kept holding my hands up Creepy Style the whole time while kevin pretended to hunt the virtual tour guide and we kept making each other laugh hysterically. Most annoying tourists in the bronze age archeological site for real. I unfortunately could not handle walking around really well (especially on virtual reality stairs lol or one time you had to drop down into the sacrificial pit…dear god) so i was basically clinging to kevin whenever we had to walk anywhere. But it was still fun overall…i couldn’t help but laugh ^_^
Overall it was really cool but a bit sparse and out of the way for what it was considering how much closer the queen JINSHA is (more on that tomorrow). I do wish there was more speculation about how people lived and such rather than just “here is an artifact” (maybe my interest lies more on the cultural/anthropological elements) but the details about bronze making techniques were very cool!
We had bronze mask themed ice cream as we walked around the outside of the museum, and came upon this really cool ceremonial altar place, where if you stood directly in the center and spoke, produced an echo that only you could hear!!! Awesome… (side note: the vanilla flavor was soooo good, it reminded me of how certain flavors of things taste different in asia, with vanilla and strawberry being the two main contenders…i was nostalgic…)
We got a didi back and went to this luosifen place (龍城柳州螺蛳粉·群星路店) that was sooooooooooooooo good!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Thanks siyao’s cousin for the rec…Yes i know luosifen isn’t vegetarian bc of the snail broth but it’s one of my Exceptions. I got it with no meat + added TOFU PUFF and it was really really yummy…..the tofu puff soaked up the broth and it was delicious, and the pickles were crunchy and refreshing. i got light spiciness, which is good bc it just impacted the amount of chili oil on it and not really the Actual spiciness… Poor kevin was really going thru it, esp because it was hot (both the noodle temperature + the outside temperature), but it was nice to sit outside at one of these chengdu “fly” restaurants (苍蝇馆子)(yes like the insect..) and eat spicy noodles…We walked around a bit, and got cha panda again. i think cha panda is best if you want something with toppings, and their fruity drinks are actually quite good. Then we walked some more, got some mid egg tarts, and returned to the hotel.
When we got back it started raining, so we decided to try out MEITUAN for dinner delivery and got the hotel ROBOT who speaks with a child’s voice to deliver us some dumplings. The dumplings were okay (i got egg + chive, they were too garlicky for me) but i have grown addicted to the takeout system here…like it’s sooooooo efficient, these meituan drivers are honestly SO serious, and there’s so many more options esp for late night, and guhhhhhh i miss it.
Saturday 4/12
This was our hustle day. First, we started off at Jinsha, which i enjoyed a lot! It ticked all the boxes that i felt sanxingdui was missing – you could see the dig site itself (as well as a very old ebony tree!), they made models of what they imagined the people’s homes and town overall looked like, and they also provided insights into the burial area. Ofc there were also plenty of cool relics, like the famed gold sunbird artifact! Rise of the golden idol…
After that we went to qingyang palace (which is more of a temple) and actually my favorite place on this trip i think…there were some really cute statues + nice incense smell again + such a lush and green temple. The greenscaping in chengdu goes HARD. I wish i had more time to spend just sitting around here, It was so beautiful. We went to the tibet district after for lunch (and all the tibetan old ladies kept staring at me adjaadfajsfd and they were so nice…one smiled really sweetly at me and another told kevin that i was very pretty. They were truly gassing me up lmao), then went to wuhou temple, which had a beautiful garden and fun little art exhibition thing going on…the green spaces here really blew me away! recommend for fans of Three Kingdoms what with all the statues + merch of the Three Guys (shuhan).
Qingyang Palace!
After that, we walked around jinli street which yeah… had a lot of stores. I tried a taro soft serve from Mixue (蜜雪冰城) which I thought was Fine, and then we went to a salon so kevin could get a perm haha. Disaster occurred but with another haircut the next day i think it worked out but oh boy he was really going thru it that night aslkjdfalkdjfasfd.
Jinli Street and Wuhou Temple!
Afterwards, we walked through the people’s park (such a nice park!! I want to spend time at the tea house next time we come here, it had a cute pond on one side and the tea house was lit up with cute string lights and had a beautiful canopy of trees covering it), tianfu square (pretty flowers), and then walked through kuanzhai alley! I found Kuanzhai alley more fun than jinli street, thought it’s the same category of Narrow Street with various street vendors/established shops. It was a bit more lively. We got both tofu dessert (甜豆花), and jelly dessert (冰粉) with rose syrup <3 <3 i love a cold sweet treat with NUTS on it.
Tianfu Square...didn't get any good pics of people's park but it's lovely and all within walking distance of each other plus Kuanzhai alley
Sweet treats!
We tried to go to a rooftop restaurant but unfortunately dianping misled us and it was closed when we got there, so we ordered some skewers (串串) from meituan instead. I really liked the enoki one (金针菇), it had a nice chew to it plus some charred bits, and i think enoki has a good surface area to collect spices…There was also a beancurd one filled with peppers that I enjoyed though it killed my stomach a bit (重庆大豆干). also please witness my valiant attempt to eat cauliflower (it wasn’t good to me in this form tbh…). We ordered some drinks from MeiTuan too from a grass jelly place (书亦烧仙草) that i actually really enjoyed…i got a mango drink with sago, and kevin got a mulberry strawberry one that was really good too. Then it was time to sleep after such a busy day.
Sunday 4/13
Kevins’ parents and grandpa had arrived the night before so it was family time! We visited Kevins’ grandmothers grave and it was very mind blowing to see my name in chinese (伊霞) engraved on it with the list of descendants….
Then we went to WenShuFang to eat a bunch of noodles at a place called 洞子口张凉粉! Can I just say…most transformative eating experience ever…We had Tianshuimian (甜水面, sweet and spicy thick sesame noodles), liangfen (凉粉, cold spicy jelly), zhuliangfen (like liangfen but boiled), and liangmian (凉面, another spicy cold noodle). UMM SO GOOD. Apparently it was a place that tourists frequent but locals also go there because it was just that good. The place was so packed and you just took a seat wherever you could find one, and then we just ripped through like 5 different bowls of noodles. It was spectacular.
Then we went to WenShuYuan monastery which was nice but pretty crowded. We went to an outdoor teahouse there, which was SUPER crowded, but luckily we managed to find seats. I learned about how tea is consumed in Chengdu with a lidded bowl (盖碗) and we drank jasmine tea which was tasty! Floral teas like jasmine are a Chengdu specialty. Also a pigeon pooped on kevin’s grandpa TWICE lakjdflakhdflakdfjhlaksjdf.
You can see the bird flying in this picture lol
After that, we went to get some walnut cookies that kevin really liked to eat growing up (jiaoyan taosu, 椒盐桃酥) that also had sesame and peppercorn in them. They’re very moreish and a bit reminiscent of rusk/butter cookies but with a bit more bite to them. There was a huge mob of people right outside the store ordering, and a different bakery next to it was totally empty. That’s how you know it’s legit…
Once the cookies were obtained, we went to a private room dinner (悦百味) with kevin’s dad’s family, who were very nice and welcoming to me! My favorite things i ate there were this horseradish stuffed wrap you dip in spicy sauce (芥味春卷), and a steamed corn cake we ate for dessert (香煎玉米条). many baijiu shots were taken that night LOL. after that, we went back to the hotel, and kevin and I went on a nice night walk to get some CHAPANDA! BOBA EVERY DAY!
Monday 4/14
First day of errands for kevin and his family. it was a wild goose chase, midway thru which i just dipped lol… went back to the hotel and chilled. I went on a walk by myself to this trendy Cosmo mall near our hotel which had SO MANY clothing stores with Y2K styling, plus a cool shop called Brain Hole where i saw many interesting prints/stickers/fun little gifts. I got Chagee as well (yay for ordering thru mobile and not needing to talk to anyone aljkdflafd). I walked around for a bit til i felt a little awkward and then returned to my hotel room. Kevin helped me order Meituan for lunch (crafting a little note for me asking the restaurant to not add meat to the mapo tofu, for one!) and then i had a very luxurious meal in the hotel room. I ordered from 百年神厨·地道川菜 and got mapo tofu (麻婆豆腐), a noodle dish with pickled veggies (酸菜炒梓潼粉), and rice, and they served it with pickles + a wheat cracker snack. It was too much food for me but i did enjoy it a lot…
saw this cute guy at the mall....also there are many stores that literally just sell hats...
Kevin came back around 5 or so, and then we went back to brain hole store to buy stuff i saw there earlier but felt too awkward to purchase on my own! Then we went to Taikooli to walk around. It was such a lively area…lots of hotpot places there had performers on balconies overlooking the street lip syncing + dancing to songs, and there was another large 3D screen that had people outside grouped up trying to Capture the Magic lol. We forgot to go to the underground bookstore WHICH WAS THE WHOLE POINT but ah well, next time..We did get to try LiShan Camelia shi (李山山茶事) milk tea, which makes fun drinks with a pretty whipped creme dome on them. Kevin got the muscat flavor, and I got a strawberry drink. On the milky side, and with a rather delicate flavor, but very tasty!
After that, we met up with kevin’s parents at the Fuqin Night Market, and I ate SO many things in such a short amount of time LOL. We had malatang skewers (麻辣烫) that we ate with a dry dip of salt/red pepper flakes/msg, then i also ate a durian filled flatbread (锅盔), banana paratha (飞饼), this egg filled with pickled radish (蛋烘糕), grilled shredded potato filled with fish mint (土豆饼夹折耳根), skewered grilled bean curd filled with spicy vegetables (烤豆干), jelly dessert with riceballs and haw and nuts and fermented rice (冰粉), and tanghulu (糖葫芦)! Which wasn’t as good as in beijing…but the tanghulu shopkeeper was really nice and gave us a discount.
some of the night market eats!
After that, we were Totally Stuffed (we kept giving all the stuff we couldn’t finish to kevin’s dad LOL and at the end he was like…this is the most full i’ve been in my life) and headed back!
Tuesday 4/15
Last full day in chengdu ;_; unfortunately it was very hot and my tummy was Not Doing well so while kevin ran around doing errands, i went back to the hotel like two different times because i was just Suffering!!!!….at one point i did go to a Yummy Snack store with kevins mom which was so cool, they sold individually packaged snacks of all varieties. I got many things…including Banana flavored Oatly, boiled peanuts, dried mangos, freeze dried strawberries, spicy pickled bamboo shoots, and lychee flavored peeling candy which was nice!
After being in the hotel for a While and watching the world’s worst youtube videos, kevin came back at 6 with his errands finally complete, and then we went to a hot pot place, meeting kevin’s mom’s college friends there. It was overall a nice experience! Unfortunately I am not the biggest fan of sichuan style sesame oil dipping sauce so i was the only one that got the sesame paste format. Also the tomato broth i got was not very flavorful, and their chrysanthemum tasted a bit Off to me sigh….but it is nice to know that the hotpot at home is at least comparable to that in chengdu in categories other than price…i just wish we could also have HUGE WOSUN at home. Im sure if i ate meat my opinion would be slightly different though.
We walked around at night to Anshun Bridge which was very beautiful and full of bars with live singing/entertainment. If we had more time, I would have loved to go into one and have a drink. But alas, it was soon time to return to the hotel and pack for our train ride the next day…
Also i just want to say…we saw SOOOO many gay couples in chengdu, like Gaydu is really an aptly named title. It was so funny because kevin’s mom did not notice at ALL and was really shocked when one of her college friends was explaining the name Gaydu to her, when we noticed like 5 on the way to the restaurant (hyperbole but. still!)
Chongqing
Wednesday 4/16
Woke up feeling a bit poorly this day but luckily it straightened out eventually. This next leg of our journey was going to be just me and kevin, so we said goodbye to kevin’s parents in the morning and then headed to the rail station. We took a train to Chongqing and rode business class bc why tf not and it was soooo luxurious…the chairs were huge and reclined all the way back to lying down position, and it came with snacks including this puffed rice snack with nuts in it that i really enjoyed…as soon as we arrived on the outskirts of chongqing, i was feeling kinda nostalgic bc the way the buildings were built into and around the hills reminded me of shimla. We dropped our luggage off at the hotel and went to this soft tofu restaurant (龚大娃豆花面) for lunch. IT WAS SO GOOD…..mine had soft tofu and peas and the noodles were delicious…we also ordered this ostmanthus flavored soft tofu with rice balls and fermented rice and it was the best dessert i had on this trip. The way it instantly cooled me down, and how the tofu was infused with osmanthus flavor…tbh i wish i had ordered more. I could eat ten bowls of that. I’m always more of a dessert person on trips (likely due to the vegetarianism tbh.) and this one really rocked my world. I'm still thinking about it to be honest!
Train ride into chongqing
<3<3<3
Chongqing has such fascinating verticality and the way the city is structured really blows the mind. I loved walking around on what I thought was street level, going over a pedestrian bridge, and then seeing that on the other side we are actually on the 4th story, somehow! Designed by mc escher…
We wandered around a few malls, got more lishanshan (李山山茶事), then went to this coffee shop called totomato which was on a cliff side overlooking the jialing river. We just sat outside for a while under the shade of this huge beautiful tree with googly eyes added to it, just people watching and drinking our bevvies. Kevin loved the pourover they got and bought a bag of coffee beans from them as well. My favorite memory of this trip, i think…i was so at peace…there were many cute cafes along this little alley that we would have gone to if we had more time.
my favorite "coffee alley"...
The only thing we had properly planned for the day was Hongya Cave so we ended up having a lot more time than we thought. At first we went to The Chongqing Art Museum/Center which had a very distinctive exterior but there was literally nothing inside lol. Like…a collection of 5 pottery pieces and that’s it. After that, we went to the People’s Liberation Monument, which was just a large square I suppose, and jiefangbei pedestrian street which was pretty cool. It had a large food area with lots of bright glowing signs, and this one huge Russian supermarket blasting Russian EDM stocked with russian cookies/snacks and like… Nutcrackers lol. Kind of a bizarre experience…We tried Happy Cow here (一只小酸奶牛), getting a guava yogurt smoothie and it was…nawt good.
After that, we went to Gaosheng Chuangfu Center, which is a very trippy place that has a plaza connected to street level on one side, but on the other side it’s on the 22nd floor of a building…like the building itself is a mountain and the street is just built on top of it. It was super fascinating but also unfortunately very miserably hot so we went to the hotel to cool off for a bit.
After cooling down, we went to a nearby food court restaurant (后小面) to try some chongqing xiaomian (重庆小面) which was very tasty…i have truly mastered the strategy to eating without suffering too much (spiciness generally only corresponds to chili oil amount, not actual spiciness! Less chili oil = food cools down faster so its not impossible to eat + you dont evacuate your guts immediately with all the oil!).
Once it was dark enough, we went to the famed Hongya Cave which was indeed a very cool market area built in an old fortress that was built on a cliff…on a cyberpunk level, i’d give it a 7/10, and the city overall had a cyberpunk level of 6/10 to me. unfortunately it was SOOO crowded, and thus not super fun to explore much because you could barely move around…but we did get some cool views! We went back to the hotel a bit earlier, got our last Chagee of the trip (which really grew on us) and just chilled and packed. Unfortunately the AC in the hotel was not working so woke up multiple times at night sweating miserably…
Cool bridge, it's full of people standing on it taking pictures of Hongya Cave
I do love how you can see the actual cave part of it from here...rare lull in the crowd.
Thursday 4/17
Home time :( let the misery commence…took a didi, sat in the airport for a while, and got a free meal from our credit card lounge though so that was nice. The flight back was okay, we watched deadpool and wolverine which pissed me off a lot (i can’t do marvel movies at all anymore u guys) and the food was pretty sinister and evil (just plain rice with some sparse greens in it for one, a congee for another that i could not even eat!)…people were coughing like CRAZY on the plane and i was doing my best to be Normal about the extreme turbulence. Luckily, we were able to pass thru customs on arrival without issue, and then linked up with jessica at the airport for what was the start of our next anime-related adventure….
In Summary
I miss China ;__; it felt like the first vacation I’ve had in a LONG LONG time where it actually felt like a vacation and not a chore? And that’s definitely because once I arrived I had no obligations and just got to chill and no one expected anything of me, and I was with people who were fluent in chinese the whole time. But it also felt like the world outside was almost paused for me…with so much going on at home, being in such a different place really took me out of my head for those two weeks. And i felt in some ways it healed me…like my anxiety management…even my tummy issues (though I was struggling a bit towards the end TBF lol). Im just very grateful to kevin in general for being such a brave travel companion + helping me navigate vegetarianism/gastro issues/lack of language proficiency. It was a lot of fun! It’s also really interesting how it changed so much from when kevin last went in 2017, for the better (a lot cleaner, better maintained public restrooms, etc).
I would love to go back and visit Chengdu again, spend more time in Chongqing, visit cities I haven’t visited before like Shanghai and Xi’an (bimbos hometown tour when?) etc. I also want to try eating vegetarian food at a temple! There was a vegetarian restaurant we planned to go to that had mapo tofu PIZZA but there was no time…CRIES…
I suppose i should also go to dufu thatched cottage esp now that kevin got a fan with him on it (running joke being that we bought tickets to dufu, but didn’t have time to go (and the tickets were automatically refunded. Was cool how good the refund policy is in china for these things), so we kept being like oh im sure we’ll go tomorrow, and then we never went, but kevin did buy his Fan! He is a fan!)). Also the pandas are on my list at Some Point…i heard the crowds obstruct the view completely but they’re celebrities and as long as i see some panda im sure that wouldn’t be the worst thing (:
Thanks kevin for translating all the foods + restaurants for me, thanks for reading! This was very meandering + poorly edited but it was fun to reminisce on my travels ^_^
um hi <3 i’ve been wanting to get back into writing dreamwidth posts again and thought this adventure was a great way to get back into it. APOLOGIES IN ADVANCE FOR MY PHOTOGRAPHY SKILLS it’s called living in da moment or whatever. you may notice crazier and crazier collages as you progress thru this...yeah i was getting tired
To no one’s surprise, this was my first time going to china (and my first trip to asia since 2019…). Kevin had some errands to run there so we decided to make a vacation out of it. There was a lot of preparation going in advance…the main things being:
- Getting a VISA: did this through a travel agency, and it wasn’t too rough of a process. Unfortunately I only got approved for a one time entry VISA (because my passport expires later this year) but hopefully my next one will be a ten year one!
- Booking attractions: many of the attractions we visited (with some exceptions, I will note), required getting tickets in advance. This could be a bit difficult to navigate because sometimes we would need a Chinese phone number (and in those cases we would borrow kevin’s grandpa’s), or the site would not be easily accessible (like I could Not access the Summer Palace website but we were able to get tickets on site). The only ones you Really had to get ahead of time were Forbidden City/Tiananmen Square though (and yeah it was necessary to wake up at like 4:45 AM a week in advance for that, alas). Some tickets we could not book until we got to China (like Sanxingdui/Jinsha, which we booked through WeChat in our hotel room)
- Payment: I set up both Alipay and WeChat pay on my phone (very rarely would I have issues with either, but it was easier to have both because I feel like it would be 50-50 which they would ask for.). We had no issues with this unless our data was bad which…more on that later lol. But I was able to verify my identity in Alipay before leaving and everything worked fine!
- VPN: I just used LetsVPN (Premium version to allow me to change regions) and that was really nice. Was able to access everything (discord, reddit, etc) with no issues. The only time I used it was when I was on WiFi because my data would already have VPN capabilities built in
- Data: I got 5GB of data from Airalo which worked well for the first half of the trip and then towards the end just would not Work at ALL! Kevin’s was even worse than mine. I did have 1GB high speed data from TMobile that I used up immediately, so even though i had two data sources I still struggled. It was fairly fast when it did work but unfortunately Airalo support could not help. I honestly don’t know what alternative to use (we ended up getting a Chinese phone that Kevin needed for something, and it had like 20GB of data, which we hotspotted and that saved our ass)
- Navigation app: I got A Map (Gaode), while Kevin just used Apple Maps (which uses gaode in the backend in china) for navigation. It was um. Interesting trying to translate the names of places from chinese into english for my english language A Map but copy paste worked well enough
- Food recommendations: I used dianping. You can search in english and it translates the search into chinese but unfortunately all the results are in chinese so the flow would be like me searching for food because my data is better and then showing the search results to Kevin to read them. And then kevin would search it on Apple maps/Didi and take us there. I would say the review rating quality is pretty similar to yelp! On occasion, the hours listed would be wrong/inaccurate, and I wasn’t sure if there was a better place to get that information, but overall we got some nice restaurant suggestions through this.
- Didi: So important to us actually…we would didi everywhere because it is SOOO cheap comparatively. Like <3$ for average trip, ~10$ for a trip to the airport, etc. i did not calculate total spending and i’m sure metro would have been even cheaper but the trip duration and convenience of Didi could not be beat.
- Meituan: Our late night food hero <3 it was a bit difficult to use because there was no translation at all but we made do!
I was really saved by the Circle to Search feature on my phone that would let me translate anything on my screen, especially when using Meituan. It took a bit of back and forth to get into a good flow of translating, selecting options, scroll, translating, but once I figured it out it was 10000x better than the WeChat translate feature!
Going into this trip I was really nervous about my Gastro Issues and Problems coming up. But other than that I was looking forward to it, esp to see the city where Kevin was born hehe. The only reference I had to prepare myself was to think of India LOL but boy was I wrong…I did work really hard on planning things and making sure we had everything prepared beforehand because I knew once we arrived I would be total dead weight. Literally I asked Kevin if there were any Chinese phrases I should learn and after looking into it a bit they were just like “Just stick with me and you’ll be fine”. Like okay <3 awesomesauce <3
Beijing
Sunday 4/6
Our flight there was pretty uneventful. I watched The Wild Robot and CRIED for some reason even though tbh…I did not like it much in retrospect. Stories about legacy and doing better for The Next Generation really get to me but I found the ending a bit roundabout and too easy. Both of my flight meals were near identical pasta dishes which like honestly…not bad for vegetarian flight food, though certainly not seasoned at all! Much better than the nasty piece of work i got on my flight to london last year…
When we arrived i was immediately shocked by how quiet it was. I thought there would be endless cars honking at each other (bc that’s what india is like from my distant memory…they just be honking!) but it was not so. It was certainly smoggy, and the scent of cigarette smoke was everywhere. There were so many gorgeous flowering trees, but other than that it seemed like the landscape was a bit sparse. My favorite was the golden weeping willow (i believe), its leaves looked almost like they were painted on by rough brushstrokes…
I got a wee honeydew tea from a vending machine (kevin: they did not have vending machines when i last visited in 2017! Me: that’s #infrastructure) to both refresh myself (teehee) and also test alipay (worked. awesome). We had a bit of confusion ordering our first didi but through the power of wandering around a bit, we made our way to our hotel! What’s funny is that this was the least fancy hotel we stayed in during this trip, but somehow my favorite…adequate room and bathroom space are important to me!
A cool street in the area...
Our hotel was in wangfujing which is a swanky neighborhood but a little…hrm…boring to me. We went to a restaurant (圣达小馆) and i got this smoky tofu dish that got me feeling kind sick unfortunately but there were also chilled cucumber/jelly noodles (cucumber lapi 黄瓜拉皮) that i enjoyed a lot. Kevin got a lamb dish but found it on the oilier side. We then wandered around the HUGE fancy street there (Wangfujing street itself), with a plethora of designer stores, and I saw my first 3D corner digital billboard.
Food stuffs
In hindsight I think every 3D billboard thing we saw was of a panda...
Monday 4/7
Woke up at 6 (easy to do thanks to jetlag) to go to the great wall at mutianyu. We hired a driver through our hotel who took us there, waited for us, and took us back. We ended up cancelling the tickets we ordered through the site, and got some through the driver and a travel group he was associated with, which saved us a little bit of money. We took the gondola up, bc i am not walking up just to walk even more on the wall itself... There were not many people there, and the wait time was negligible!
The walk was honestly…kinda rough LOL. the hero’s slope…oh my god…it’s basically a vertical slope at the end, and thank god we went early in the morning because otherwise it would have been so hot with little shade. It had me wondering…have people died trying to climb this?? Bc i could easily imagine someone falling on these vertical stairs and then rolling all the way down. My legs were trembling uncontrollably on the walk back but it was really satisfying to get there even though the view was like. The same as at any other point on the wall. They said that you are not a man until you climb hero’s slope….well i did it lads. It wasn’t super lush/green when we went, i suppose due to early spring, but there were some pretty white flowering trees on the mountainside.
So many cats on the way up to the wall...it seems like a rough life ):
Gondola! It would "launch" with such frightening speed...
When we got out it was also soooo crowded like everyone and their mother was lined up waiting to get in. So thankful we got there early, i think it’s a necessity if you don’t want to wait in line all day + have a million people in your photos. It was on the walk back to the car that i had my first fated interaction with tanghulu…why is it SO DELICIOUS?? We walked by it on the way up and kevin was like “ah i bet this is the shoddy tourist stuff and the prices are scalped” and then on the way back they were like “FUCK IT im just gonna buy you one” and honestly i feel like it was the best tanghulu i had on the whole trip. I had the strawberry kind, and i’m not sure WHAT they put in their strawberries (perhaps the strawberries are soaked in sugar water???), but it was so fucking good and i was thinking about it for the rest of the trip. Maybe the post-hero’s slope exhaustion/my lactic acid soaked muscles enabled me to enjoy Brilliant Strawberry Sugar Treat to the utmost…My skewer eating skills were shoddy though and i did have sugar on my face quite often though. oops!
We had the driver drop us off at a Peking duck restaurant (盛福年烤鸭店·故宫点). Kevin had a really awesome experience while I ate more cold jelly cucumber noodles, which certainly has restorative properties! I also ate a warm vegetable dish. It was funny because when we were served, after kevin explained i was vegetarian, they put a piece of duck in my bowl which made me go (?_?), but then Kevin told me that a lot of vegetarians in china aren’t full vegetarian, and are usually vegetarian for health reasons but are okay with eating meat occasionally, or “trying” meat once in certain situations. The Peking duck came with haw pieces and blueberry jam in addition to the normal green onion and sweet bean sauce (甜面酱) which i found very interesting. The service was super great as well, the waiter came over to use his phone flashlight to light up the scene when he saw Kevin taking a photo of me/our food, and he gave us extra complimentary mango haw snack at the end as we were leaving…so kind…he also gave us this tasty lemon mint…
We then went to the Best boba place in Beijing according to dianping called Koi Thé, and got these cream cheese drinks with tapioca pearls. I got grape and kevin got mango. Kevin’s was SOOOO GOOD like that particular variety of mango that’s not the sour kind that is usually used in american mango bevvies…rather it is something creamy and sweet and delicate and almost floral...WOW. the pearls itself were okay, didn’t have the right level of chew to them. It was here that we began to learn that it is rather american of us to get boba for the Toppies. More on that Later. Because boba/milk tea is so cheap we were very determined to get BOBA EVERY DAY. B.E.D.!
Other than that, not much to note on this day…we chilled in a variety of malls, and there were sooo many of them!
Later on, we grabbed some pastries to eat for breakfast the next day, i tried some haw tanghulu (strawberry is still my fave), and we grabbed some street food (小吃 xiaochi) to eat back at the hotel. I got some 卤 (braised) beancurd and lotus and wosun and enoki mushroom and i really liked the lotus…crunchy and fun. Kevin got some rabbit.
Tuesday 4/8
We had tiananmen square and forbidden city planned for this day! We had to wait in line in multiple lines, one to get through tiananmen square which took forever. It was funny because they look through your bag in security and the guard did not know what anything i had was lol. She was investigating my sunscreen stick + hand sanitizer spray and as kevin explained everything to her she kept calling it all very high tech lmao. Tiananmen square was HUGE and we walked through it pretty fast to get to forbidden palace…which was also SO BIG. we didn’t even go through it all because 2/3rds of the way through, it was like 3pm and we needed to get some food. To be honest i found it a bit underwhelming/plain inside but there were some fun stone + terracotta sculptures that I enjoyed a lot. They had some lovely lilacs too, but otherwise the garden was rather simple, though maybe it was too early in the season. I learned a lot about Emperor Qianlong, the ultimate mother lover as well.
Woman listening to music stone figure :3c
Afterwards, we went to this zhajiangmian place (方砖厂69号炸酱面·烤鸭) for a late lunch! Apparently it has a michelin bib, which is inexpensive + easily made but still good? Anyways, kevin had zhajiangmian(not vegetarian) and i ordered sesame noodles instead which was nice because it had a variety of textures and tasted good and filled me up. Kevin got this speciality plate that came with more toppings and shared them with me so I was lost in the sesame sauce. It was quite good and we also got sesame marinated cabbage that was so crunchy and fun and tasted exactly like apples with peanut butter to me both texturally and taste wise. I also learned that cold drinks in China are not that cold…we ordered an arctic soda (mandarin flavored) and though it was in the fridge it was warm.
Amazing… afterwards i horfed down another strawberry tanghulu in 2 minutes before our didi arrived to take us to lama temple which i THOROUGHLY enjoyed and kevin made fun of me for it! sorry for having a religious background n then essentially leaving it but also missing temples because i haven’t been in ages! It is nice that they give you complimentary incense…it smelled sooo nice to me and i basically stood around for a long time just smelling and looking around, the smoke scent was everywhere and you could pick it up from blocks away. There was a very tall buddha statue, which I was not expecting to be as tall as it was! i always feel inherently awkward at churches/non hindu temples/etc but it was still a very nice and peaceful experience.
After that, we walked to another tanghulu place (I think it was 地安门冰糖葫芦) and i got to try a bunch of different types! One with goldenberry (姑娘果 guniangguo) which tasted exactly like jalebi to me, and another with haw + glutinous rice, and another strawberry one…yeah strawberry is still my fave, but they were all tasty. We walked with our tanghulu over to jingshan park, which had an awesome view as it overlooked the forbidden city.
We took a didi to get boba near our hotel at No Yeye No Tea (爷爷不泡茶) which i think was maybe my favorite milk tea place this whole trip…kevin got a cherry blossom special with jelly and a bunch of other stuff and it was so good to me. I can’t even remember what i got, i think a simple osmanthus or oolong milk tea, and that also had a lovely tea flavor! Then we were quite tired and went to bed. Amazing being able to drink a milk tea at 8pm and still be able to sleep.
Wednesday 4/9
Our final day in beijing! We took a didi over to the summer palace which i found striking…the scale of it is so amazing! I kinda hyped it up in my head a lot because when we were planning our trip kevin kept mentioning how empress dowager cixi bankrupted china to reconstruct/enlarge the summer palace instead of building the navy up and then that enabled britain to attack and it got damaged again lol. So i was likely surely this place is AWESOME if it bankrupted china, to which kevin was like wouldn’t that mean it’s the OPPOSITE of awesome? Bc they ran out of money? But anyways, I do think it lived up to its reputation, just seeing how vast everything was, and it was fun to ferry across the lakes and such. Unfortunately, i think by this point i was getting really tired of just walking, and it was crowded, so after visiting some of the temples/seeing the stone boat, we decided to dip and get lunch…
We went to a 2 michelin star vegetarian restaurant called King’s Joy! It was very impromptu because i had been wanting to go to an all vegetarian restaurant at some point on this trip and then i saw this recommended online so we just went even though we didn’t have a reservation and were wearing busted ass tourist clothes scream. There were roughly 15 courses? My favorites were the clay pot wild mushroom peach resin stew (fun textures and a very comforting taste that kind of reminded me of simple lentil dishes), candied mulberry + wild mulberry liquor (basically mulberry tanghulu which ofc i was gonna love + the mulberry baijiu left a pleasant warm feeling in my belly) + the bamboo braised rice casserole (the sticky rice was a fun texture and it came with these moreish pickled veggies). The osmanthus milk pudding dessert was also creamy and delicious! It was a fun experience overall. It felt a bit Too fancy for me (the kind of place where there are attendants in the bathroom to guide you to a stall, and then as soon as you’re done, they go in after you to flush again and make sure it’s clean + hand you a towel after you are done washing your hands…) and overall the food was good but not the Best fine dining experience i had, only because there was a lot of repetition between courses (lots of mushroomy things with mild flavors). But i can finally say i’ve been to a michelin restaurant at least, and a vegetarian one at that! This accounted for like ½ of the vacation spending lmao.
The pickled veggies + mushroom rice dish, mushroom peach resin stew, milk pudding
We then took a didi (with a driver who kevin said was really rude + thought i was turkish lmao) and went to the temple of heaven. We didn’t spend long there because i think we were just burnt out…there wasn’t that much to see and dogwood (?) pollen kept flying into my face here. After many failed attempts to locate either A suitably stocked jellycat store (even FAO Schwarz was meh) OR An archery store, we gave up and tried Chagee milk tea (霸王茶姬) (which neither of us liked!!! Too creamy!!! Though they did have the coolest cup design + ongoing nezha collab lol). Then went back to the hotel to massage our feets and pack!
Chengdu
Thursday 4/10
We got to the airport soooooooooo early, and just sat around sweating. Had a mediocre brunch type meal at this airport restaurant but they did have a delicious, thick, creamy yogurt. Overall, the yogurt in china is really nice, and i believe the milk is ultra pasteurized so it’s better if you are lactose intolerant. Our travel agency told us there wouldn’t be a meal served on our 12:55 PM flight but there WAS…when Kevin told them I couldn’t eat it because I was vegetarian, the flight hostesses pulled a vegetarian meal out of their OWN lunch man i felt so bad…but why was it actually the best flight meal i have ever had! even though it was just Rice, bok choy, and mushroom??? It came with this “hainan special sauce” that was SOOO good to me. It also came with yam cakes that were pretty yummy…delightful
The temperature difference was astounding…immediately started sweating as we got out of the plane. Unsure how people are able to walk around in jeans and a sweater in 86*F weather but i really respect that. I have horrible temperature regulation so just had to make do…i couldn’t style my hair at all in chengdu tbh because it would just get instantly frizzy. i also noticed how green chengdu is <3 it is so gorgeous to drive into from the airport, really lush hills and farms.
Our hotel was quite nice, though a bit cramped, and close to the city center! We went on a really crazy journey to the New Century Global Center which gave the vibes of the most haunted mall in existence. Somehow we could not find the main entrance so we walked through this covered waterpark area that was basically abandoned…devoid of water or children or joy, just dark and desolate set pieces and the occasional couple sitting at an otherwise empty food court table. I thought I was going to be hunted for sport…
CREEPY!
Once we finally got to the mall proper, the first thing i saw was a tanghulu stand (NICE! It funny bc the day we left beijing i kept desperately asking kevin if they have tanghulu in the south and they were like erm it’s a northern speciality so maybe not??? But they do have it…unfortunately it’s not as good but still suffices) and then we also tried Cha Panda/Tea ByDo. i got a pomelo and mango coconut milk drink that was unfortunately way too bitter for me <3 we milled around the mall a bit. It was sooooooooooo big, and it’s crazy because it feels like each individual mall has stores that exist nowhere else…just stores popping up out of the ether. Some kind of crazy cosmic energy in these malls.
We then took a didi to a sichuanese duck place (张烤鸭·青石桥店). I got eggplant made vegetarian (鱼香茄子) and it was SOOO DELICIOUS. super gingery…i wish i could have scooped up the leftover sauce and eaten it with rice but i was trying to be very careful this whole trip about not destroying my stomach with too much oil/pepper/spice sigh but it was so good and the eggplant was crispy and chewy and not too oily either tbh! Thinking of her… They served us some pickled veggies to eat it with and wow. I was feeling Good. Honestly the food in chengdu overall was muchhhhhhhhhh better to my tastes…it was also fun to hear kevin conversing with people in sichuanese now instead of mandarin :3 (as if my ass could tell the different for real but i think i was starting to pick up on subtleties, and kevin did explain the differences to me as well).
Most busted photo of yummy eggplant + sichuan style duck dish
Friday 4/11
Sanxingdui day babieee time to explore some bronze age relics! Our hotel had a bus outside that took us there and it took roughly 90 minutes. It was SOOO COOL the level of detail people were able to commit to with these masks…the whole time i kept saying “wow this is literally case of the golden idol….mask of the golden idol….case of the golden mask…” (video game brain). So endeared to the huge gallery of masks they had where each had different facial features…I wonder, who are you supposed to be? Someone with a long nose, someone with thick eyebrows, or a shorter chin. It felt very special…
one of the figurines looked like Angry Pig...
The funnest part for me was this random VR experience we did there. TBH i did not want to do it because i was scared i was gonna be motion sick (and i was! I was!) but it was soooo goofy. The audio was completely in chinese so kevin just translated for me throughout. But we were being so silly because you could see other player’s hands in the VR so i kept holding my hands up Creepy Style the whole time while kevin pretended to hunt the virtual tour guide and we kept making each other laugh hysterically. Most annoying tourists in the bronze age archeological site for real. I unfortunately could not handle walking around really well (especially on virtual reality stairs lol or one time you had to drop down into the sacrificial pit…dear god) so i was basically clinging to kevin whenever we had to walk anywhere. But it was still fun overall…i couldn’t help but laugh ^_^
Overall it was really cool but a bit sparse and out of the way for what it was considering how much closer the queen JINSHA is (more on that tomorrow). I do wish there was more speculation about how people lived and such rather than just “here is an artifact” (maybe my interest lies more on the cultural/anthropological elements) but the details about bronze making techniques were very cool!
We had bronze mask themed ice cream as we walked around the outside of the museum, and came upon this really cool ceremonial altar place, where if you stood directly in the center and spoke, produced an echo that only you could hear!!! Awesome… (side note: the vanilla flavor was soooo good, it reminded me of how certain flavors of things taste different in asia, with vanilla and strawberry being the two main contenders…i was nostalgic…)
We got a didi back and went to this luosifen place (龍城柳州螺蛳粉·群星路店) that was sooooooooooooooo good!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Thanks siyao’s cousin for the rec…Yes i know luosifen isn’t vegetarian bc of the snail broth but it’s one of my Exceptions. I got it with no meat + added TOFU PUFF and it was really really yummy…..the tofu puff soaked up the broth and it was delicious, and the pickles were crunchy and refreshing. i got light spiciness, which is good bc it just impacted the amount of chili oil on it and not really the Actual spiciness… Poor kevin was really going thru it, esp because it was hot (both the noodle temperature + the outside temperature), but it was nice to sit outside at one of these chengdu “fly” restaurants (苍蝇馆子)(yes like the insect..) and eat spicy noodles…We walked around a bit, and got cha panda again. i think cha panda is best if you want something with toppings, and their fruity drinks are actually quite good. Then we walked some more, got some mid egg tarts, and returned to the hotel.
When we got back it started raining, so we decided to try out MEITUAN for dinner delivery and got the hotel ROBOT who speaks with a child’s voice to deliver us some dumplings. The dumplings were okay (i got egg + chive, they were too garlicky for me) but i have grown addicted to the takeout system here…like it’s sooooooo efficient, these meituan drivers are honestly SO serious, and there’s so many more options esp for late night, and guhhhhhh i miss it.
Saturday 4/12
This was our hustle day. First, we started off at Jinsha, which i enjoyed a lot! It ticked all the boxes that i felt sanxingdui was missing – you could see the dig site itself (as well as a very old ebony tree!), they made models of what they imagined the people’s homes and town overall looked like, and they also provided insights into the burial area. Ofc there were also plenty of cool relics, like the famed gold sunbird artifact! Rise of the golden idol…
After that we went to qingyang palace (which is more of a temple) and actually my favorite place on this trip i think…there were some really cute statues + nice incense smell again + such a lush and green temple. The greenscaping in chengdu goes HARD. I wish i had more time to spend just sitting around here, It was so beautiful. We went to the tibet district after for lunch (and all the tibetan old ladies kept staring at me adjaadfajsfd and they were so nice…one smiled really sweetly at me and another told kevin that i was very pretty. They were truly gassing me up lmao), then went to wuhou temple, which had a beautiful garden and fun little art exhibition thing going on…the green spaces here really blew me away! recommend for fans of Three Kingdoms what with all the statues + merch of the Three Guys (shuhan).
Qingyang Palace!
After that, we walked around jinli street which yeah… had a lot of stores. I tried a taro soft serve from Mixue (蜜雪冰城) which I thought was Fine, and then we went to a salon so kevin could get a perm haha. Disaster occurred but with another haircut the next day i think it worked out but oh boy he was really going thru it that night aslkjdfalkdjfasfd.
Jinli Street and Wuhou Temple!
Afterwards, we walked through the people’s park (such a nice park!! I want to spend time at the tea house next time we come here, it had a cute pond on one side and the tea house was lit up with cute string lights and had a beautiful canopy of trees covering it), tianfu square (pretty flowers), and then walked through kuanzhai alley! I found Kuanzhai alley more fun than jinli street, thought it’s the same category of Narrow Street with various street vendors/established shops. It was a bit more lively. We got both tofu dessert (甜豆花), and jelly dessert (冰粉) with rose syrup <3 <3 i love a cold sweet treat with NUTS on it.
Tianfu Square...didn't get any good pics of people's park but it's lovely and all within walking distance of each other plus Kuanzhai alley
Sweet treats!
We tried to go to a rooftop restaurant but unfortunately dianping misled us and it was closed when we got there, so we ordered some skewers (串串) from meituan instead. I really liked the enoki one (金针菇), it had a nice chew to it plus some charred bits, and i think enoki has a good surface area to collect spices…There was also a beancurd one filled with peppers that I enjoyed though it killed my stomach a bit (重庆大豆干). also please witness my valiant attempt to eat cauliflower (it wasn’t good to me in this form tbh…). We ordered some drinks from MeiTuan too from a grass jelly place (书亦烧仙草) that i actually really enjoyed…i got a mango drink with sago, and kevin got a mulberry strawberry one that was really good too. Then it was time to sleep after such a busy day.
Sunday 4/13
Kevins’ parents and grandpa had arrived the night before so it was family time! We visited Kevins’ grandmothers grave and it was very mind blowing to see my name in chinese (伊霞) engraved on it with the list of descendants….
Then we went to WenShuFang to eat a bunch of noodles at a place called 洞子口张凉粉! Can I just say…most transformative eating experience ever…We had Tianshuimian (甜水面, sweet and spicy thick sesame noodles), liangfen (凉粉, cold spicy jelly), zhuliangfen (like liangfen but boiled), and liangmian (凉面, another spicy cold noodle). UMM SO GOOD. Apparently it was a place that tourists frequent but locals also go there because it was just that good. The place was so packed and you just took a seat wherever you could find one, and then we just ripped through like 5 different bowls of noodles. It was spectacular.
Then we went to WenShuYuan monastery which was nice but pretty crowded. We went to an outdoor teahouse there, which was SUPER crowded, but luckily we managed to find seats. I learned about how tea is consumed in Chengdu with a lidded bowl (盖碗) and we drank jasmine tea which was tasty! Floral teas like jasmine are a Chengdu specialty. Also a pigeon pooped on kevin’s grandpa TWICE lakjdflakhdflakdfjhlaksjdf.
You can see the bird flying in this picture lol
After that, we went to get some walnut cookies that kevin really liked to eat growing up (jiaoyan taosu, 椒盐桃酥) that also had sesame and peppercorn in them. They’re very moreish and a bit reminiscent of rusk/butter cookies but with a bit more bite to them. There was a huge mob of people right outside the store ordering, and a different bakery next to it was totally empty. That’s how you know it’s legit…
Once the cookies were obtained, we went to a private room dinner (悦百味) with kevin’s dad’s family, who were very nice and welcoming to me! My favorite things i ate there were this horseradish stuffed wrap you dip in spicy sauce (芥味春卷), and a steamed corn cake we ate for dessert (香煎玉米条). many baijiu shots were taken that night LOL. after that, we went back to the hotel, and kevin and I went on a nice night walk to get some CHAPANDA! BOBA EVERY DAY!
Monday 4/14
First day of errands for kevin and his family. it was a wild goose chase, midway thru which i just dipped lol… went back to the hotel and chilled. I went on a walk by myself to this trendy Cosmo mall near our hotel which had SO MANY clothing stores with Y2K styling, plus a cool shop called Brain Hole where i saw many interesting prints/stickers/fun little gifts. I got Chagee as well (yay for ordering thru mobile and not needing to talk to anyone aljkdflafd). I walked around for a bit til i felt a little awkward and then returned to my hotel room. Kevin helped me order Meituan for lunch (crafting a little note for me asking the restaurant to not add meat to the mapo tofu, for one!) and then i had a very luxurious meal in the hotel room. I ordered from 百年神厨·地道川菜 and got mapo tofu (麻婆豆腐), a noodle dish with pickled veggies (酸菜炒梓潼粉), and rice, and they served it with pickles + a wheat cracker snack. It was too much food for me but i did enjoy it a lot…
saw this cute guy at the mall....also there are many stores that literally just sell hats...
Kevin came back around 5 or so, and then we went back to brain hole store to buy stuff i saw there earlier but felt too awkward to purchase on my own! Then we went to Taikooli to walk around. It was such a lively area…lots of hotpot places there had performers on balconies overlooking the street lip syncing + dancing to songs, and there was another large 3D screen that had people outside grouped up trying to Capture the Magic lol. We forgot to go to the underground bookstore WHICH WAS THE WHOLE POINT but ah well, next time..We did get to try LiShan Camelia shi (李山山茶事) milk tea, which makes fun drinks with a pretty whipped creme dome on them. Kevin got the muscat flavor, and I got a strawberry drink. On the milky side, and with a rather delicate flavor, but very tasty!
After that, we met up with kevin’s parents at the Fuqin Night Market, and I ate SO many things in such a short amount of time LOL. We had malatang skewers (麻辣烫) that we ate with a dry dip of salt/red pepper flakes/msg, then i also ate a durian filled flatbread (锅盔), banana paratha (飞饼), this egg filled with pickled radish (蛋烘糕), grilled shredded potato filled with fish mint (土豆饼夹折耳根), skewered grilled bean curd filled with spicy vegetables (烤豆干), jelly dessert with riceballs and haw and nuts and fermented rice (冰粉), and tanghulu (糖葫芦)! Which wasn’t as good as in beijing…but the tanghulu shopkeeper was really nice and gave us a discount.
some of the night market eats!
After that, we were Totally Stuffed (we kept giving all the stuff we couldn’t finish to kevin’s dad LOL and at the end he was like…this is the most full i’ve been in my life) and headed back!
Tuesday 4/15
Last full day in chengdu ;_; unfortunately it was very hot and my tummy was Not Doing well so while kevin ran around doing errands, i went back to the hotel like two different times because i was just Suffering!!!!….at one point i did go to a Yummy Snack store with kevins mom which was so cool, they sold individually packaged snacks of all varieties. I got many things…including Banana flavored Oatly, boiled peanuts, dried mangos, freeze dried strawberries, spicy pickled bamboo shoots, and lychee flavored peeling candy which was nice!
After being in the hotel for a While and watching the world’s worst youtube videos, kevin came back at 6 with his errands finally complete, and then we went to a hot pot place, meeting kevin’s mom’s college friends there. It was overall a nice experience! Unfortunately I am not the biggest fan of sichuan style sesame oil dipping sauce so i was the only one that got the sesame paste format. Also the tomato broth i got was not very flavorful, and their chrysanthemum tasted a bit Off to me sigh….but it is nice to know that the hotpot at home is at least comparable to that in chengdu in categories other than price…i just wish we could also have HUGE WOSUN at home. Im sure if i ate meat my opinion would be slightly different though.
We walked around at night to Anshun Bridge which was very beautiful and full of bars with live singing/entertainment. If we had more time, I would have loved to go into one and have a drink. But alas, it was soon time to return to the hotel and pack for our train ride the next day…
Also i just want to say…we saw SOOOO many gay couples in chengdu, like Gaydu is really an aptly named title. It was so funny because kevin’s mom did not notice at ALL and was really shocked when one of her college friends was explaining the name Gaydu to her, when we noticed like 5 on the way to the restaurant (hyperbole but. still!)
Chongqing
Wednesday 4/16
Woke up feeling a bit poorly this day but luckily it straightened out eventually. This next leg of our journey was going to be just me and kevin, so we said goodbye to kevin’s parents in the morning and then headed to the rail station. We took a train to Chongqing and rode business class bc why tf not and it was soooo luxurious…the chairs were huge and reclined all the way back to lying down position, and it came with snacks including this puffed rice snack with nuts in it that i really enjoyed…as soon as we arrived on the outskirts of chongqing, i was feeling kinda nostalgic bc the way the buildings were built into and around the hills reminded me of shimla. We dropped our luggage off at the hotel and went to this soft tofu restaurant (龚大娃豆花面) for lunch. IT WAS SO GOOD…..mine had soft tofu and peas and the noodles were delicious…we also ordered this ostmanthus flavored soft tofu with rice balls and fermented rice and it was the best dessert i had on this trip. The way it instantly cooled me down, and how the tofu was infused with osmanthus flavor…tbh i wish i had ordered more. I could eat ten bowls of that. I’m always more of a dessert person on trips (likely due to the vegetarianism tbh.) and this one really rocked my world. I'm still thinking about it to be honest!
Train ride into chongqing
<3<3<3
Chongqing has such fascinating verticality and the way the city is structured really blows the mind. I loved walking around on what I thought was street level, going over a pedestrian bridge, and then seeing that on the other side we are actually on the 4th story, somehow! Designed by mc escher…
We wandered around a few malls, got more lishanshan (李山山茶事), then went to this coffee shop called totomato which was on a cliff side overlooking the jialing river. We just sat outside for a while under the shade of this huge beautiful tree with googly eyes added to it, just people watching and drinking our bevvies. Kevin loved the pourover they got and bought a bag of coffee beans from them as well. My favorite memory of this trip, i think…i was so at peace…there were many cute cafes along this little alley that we would have gone to if we had more time.
my favorite "coffee alley"...
The only thing we had properly planned for the day was Hongya Cave so we ended up having a lot more time than we thought. At first we went to The Chongqing Art Museum/Center which had a very distinctive exterior but there was literally nothing inside lol. Like…a collection of 5 pottery pieces and that’s it. After that, we went to the People’s Liberation Monument, which was just a large square I suppose, and jiefangbei pedestrian street which was pretty cool. It had a large food area with lots of bright glowing signs, and this one huge Russian supermarket blasting Russian EDM stocked with russian cookies/snacks and like… Nutcrackers lol. Kind of a bizarre experience…We tried Happy Cow here (一只小酸奶牛), getting a guava yogurt smoothie and it was…nawt good.
After that, we went to Gaosheng Chuangfu Center, which is a very trippy place that has a plaza connected to street level on one side, but on the other side it’s on the 22nd floor of a building…like the building itself is a mountain and the street is just built on top of it. It was super fascinating but also unfortunately very miserably hot so we went to the hotel to cool off for a bit.
After cooling down, we went to a nearby food court restaurant (后小面) to try some chongqing xiaomian (重庆小面) which was very tasty…i have truly mastered the strategy to eating without suffering too much (spiciness generally only corresponds to chili oil amount, not actual spiciness! Less chili oil = food cools down faster so its not impossible to eat + you dont evacuate your guts immediately with all the oil!).
Once it was dark enough, we went to the famed Hongya Cave which was indeed a very cool market area built in an old fortress that was built on a cliff…on a cyberpunk level, i’d give it a 7/10, and the city overall had a cyberpunk level of 6/10 to me. unfortunately it was SOOO crowded, and thus not super fun to explore much because you could barely move around…but we did get some cool views! We went back to the hotel a bit earlier, got our last Chagee of the trip (which really grew on us) and just chilled and packed. Unfortunately the AC in the hotel was not working so woke up multiple times at night sweating miserably…
Cool bridge, it's full of people standing on it taking pictures of Hongya Cave
I do love how you can see the actual cave part of it from here...rare lull in the crowd.
Thursday 4/17
Home time :( let the misery commence…took a didi, sat in the airport for a while, and got a free meal from our credit card lounge though so that was nice. The flight back was okay, we watched deadpool and wolverine which pissed me off a lot (i can’t do marvel movies at all anymore u guys) and the food was pretty sinister and evil (just plain rice with some sparse greens in it for one, a congee for another that i could not even eat!)…people were coughing like CRAZY on the plane and i was doing my best to be Normal about the extreme turbulence. Luckily, we were able to pass thru customs on arrival without issue, and then linked up with jessica at the airport for what was the start of our next anime-related adventure….
In Summary
I miss China ;__; it felt like the first vacation I’ve had in a LONG LONG time where it actually felt like a vacation and not a chore? And that’s definitely because once I arrived I had no obligations and just got to chill and no one expected anything of me, and I was with people who were fluent in chinese the whole time. But it also felt like the world outside was almost paused for me…with so much going on at home, being in such a different place really took me out of my head for those two weeks. And i felt in some ways it healed me…like my anxiety management…even my tummy issues (though I was struggling a bit towards the end TBF lol). Im just very grateful to kevin in general for being such a brave travel companion + helping me navigate vegetarianism/gastro issues/lack of language proficiency. It was a lot of fun! It’s also really interesting how it changed so much from when kevin last went in 2017, for the better (a lot cleaner, better maintained public restrooms, etc).
I would love to go back and visit Chengdu again, spend more time in Chongqing, visit cities I haven’t visited before like Shanghai and Xi’an (bimbos hometown tour when?) etc. I also want to try eating vegetarian food at a temple! There was a vegetarian restaurant we planned to go to that had mapo tofu PIZZA but there was no time…CRIES…
I suppose i should also go to dufu thatched cottage esp now that kevin got a fan with him on it (running joke being that we bought tickets to dufu, but didn’t have time to go (and the tickets were automatically refunded. Was cool how good the refund policy is in china for these things), so we kept being like oh im sure we’ll go tomorrow, and then we never went, but kevin did buy his Fan! He is a fan!)). Also the pandas are on my list at Some Point…i heard the crowds obstruct the view completely but they’re celebrities and as long as i see some panda im sure that wouldn’t be the worst thing (:
Thanks kevin for translating all the foods + restaurants for me, thanks for reading! This was very meandering + poorly edited but it was fun to reminisce on my travels ^_^