Laura: We flew to China via Lhasa in Tibet and saw the most beautiful sight in the world for free! The snowy peaks of the Himalaya rising out of the clouds to meet a perfect blue sky. Apparently tourists often commission planes to do this but we just got lucky! We arrived at Chengdu Airport around 4pm and after hitting the ATM we found our pick up man from the hostel and made our way there.
My first impression of China was definitely a good one. It felt really strange to be in a city where the roads have lanes, the women show some skin (everyone wears hot pants here) and the streets are clean. After going to India and Nepal I had come to forget all these things and was very excited to be back! The weather was absolutely roasting when we arrived but it rained the second day and was a little cold for the rest of the week. The weather in China is very unpredictable I am told. The hostel (Chengdu Dreams) was absolutely brilliant. IT WAS CLEAN!!!! I almost wet myself when I saw that my bed had a clean sheet, duvet cover, pillow case, great duvet/pillow and a cute little night light! THE SHOWERS WERE HOT AS WELL!!!! We sat at the bar on the first night both really happy to be in China and looking back on all the filthy places we had stayed in the last 3 months. We were also drinking large bottles of Tsingtao for 50p!!
So far I love the Chinese people. They are absolutely adorable. Ahmad gets stared at so much because of his hair which is great because it takes the heat off me. People approached us a lot in Chengdu just to say hello or practice their English. They also approach you just to stare at what you are doing, mostly when we roll cigarettes. The language barrier is not too much of a problem with a phrasebook because you just point to the words in Mandarin but sometimes you can only do this for so long and have to resort to pointing and hand and body actions which makes you look like a lunatic! If people don’t understand you at all they mostly just ignore you and hope that you’ll leave as soon as possible! To keep costs down we have been eating the ultimate pot noodle. All the hostels have hot water dispensers on every floor to facilitate eating this MSG filled meal. Imagine a pot noodle and double the size and variety of accompanying sachets. They cost 35p for a big one so we have at least one a day to minimize costs. The fruit here is also cheap and delicious.
On our first day we decided to visit a few tour agencies to see how much a 5 day Tibet tour would cost. Our hostel wasn’t running another tour for two weeks, but Holly’s next door offered a 5 day tour for £350 excluding transport which is pretty average. We then walked around Chengdu for 4 hours trying to find two other hostels, got completely lost and then gave up on the idea. After considering our budget we decided not to go to Tibet as it would cost us £500 total each for 5 days which would increase the chance of us returning home a month early; it just wasn’t worth it.
The next day we caught the bus (for 20p!) to a nunnery in the city centre. We arrived just as the nuns were eating their lunch and an old lady took pity on us, gave two bowls and some chopsticks and ushered us into the dining room. We sat on a bench at a long row of tables four deep facing towards exactly the same on the other side (4 sets of tables facing 4 sets of tables) and the nuns sat in the first two sets in the middle. People were walking up and down the rows spooning rice and vegetables into people’s bowls while the nuns began singing (blessing the meal). It was a lovely experience and the food was great and cheap (you could eat as much as you wanted for 50p). For some reason I seemed to get a huge portion of this gross dish with cabbage and beans which I couldn’t stomach but then I felt ashamed for leaving it especially since the Chinese woman next to me kept staring! The old lady from before also brought me a spoon and said it was ok to use it (she was really sweet) but I insisted chopsticks were fine.
The next day we went to a temple just outside the city centre which was beautiful. Since we had such a great experience at lunch the day before we decided to eat here as well. We walked into the dining room and all the tables were filled with loud and hungry Chinese families. Everything was written in Mandarin (obviously) and there was only one table free. We walked between the tables for a bit looking completely confused, wandered out and then wandered in again as if something might change the next time round (sort of like looking in the fridge, seeing nothing you fancy and then doing exactly the same thing all over again). At this point I had my first freak out moment in China and I have no idea why! It was like brain overload! I couldn’t make sense of anything and it was making me crazy – Ahmad thought this was hilarious and just sat down watching me have a meltdown. He said he was seeing how long it would take for me to lose it completely. We exited the hall shortly afterwards, purchased a pot noodle and had some green tea in the tea house. This was clearly the place that Chinese came to relax on a Sunday and I’m not surprised because you pay 50p and get refillable green tea all afternoon! They were playing cards and many other games I have never seen before, eating their own lunches and every now and again staring at Ahmad!
That night we went to a market area next to a park and sampled our first street food. A lot of it is what you would expect: pigs trotters, intestines and fertilised eggs (so gross) but you could also get meat and potato skewers, noodles and rice/vegetables. We will probably get more adventurous in Beijing but we opted for the latter here. A few people asked to take our pictures and we agreed because unlike India, the locals don’t super impose your photos into porn!
Smoking is big in China. Ahmad has therefore been smoking for two since we got here. He bought some local cigarettes with a panda on the front (symbol of Chengdu) and was disappointed to discover that they didn’t rip his throat out like the last time he was in China. The spitting is not too bad in Chendgu but it may get worse so watch this space.
As Chengdu is fairly cosmopolitan we did some shopping and I decided to get into the spirit of things by buying some denim hotpants. We also went to McDonalds (I am ashamed to say that I have had two big macs here!) I hardly ate it at home but for some reason I have been craving it like mad! I love Chinese food but after travelling for 5 months you crave a bit of home in your belly. The big macs here are the biggest I have ever had and they actually look like the picture! Ahmad took a story set of photos to mark this occasion and has been trying to get me to eat McDonalds every day since to shame me even more.
On Sunday evening we relaxed at the hostel and I spent a few hours talking to two Chinese girls in my dorm (Ahmad and I stayed in separate dorms for the first 3 nights). They were studying English and American culture at university and were eager to ask me lots of questions about home. It was a great two way exchange of information because they told me a lot about Chinese culture and I tried to explain what England was like. They asked me to explain our culture and I was stumped! I said that we went to the pub a lot! They had read in textbooks that the English were very serious and polite. The funniest thing they had been told was that English people don’t like to touch each other and always have a metre distance when talking or socialising! I probably wrecked their image of brits but I thought they should know the truth. (Ahmad: Laura fails to mention that they thought that American girls were ‘open’, meaning whores) At 12pm I said I was going to sleep. I think everyone else in the dorm was ready to kill us because of all the talking and hysterical laughter but I think the Chinese girls would have talked to me all night if they could – they were soaking up the information like sponges!
We also met a nice Korean couple in the hostel who gave us a lot of tips about where to go in China and helped us write things in mandarin to book our train tickets.
On Monday we took a bus out of Chengdu to Xindu to visit The Monastery of Divine Light. We had to take a rickshaw from the bus station to the monastery and completely misread how much the driver was charging us. We thought he said 6Y but he actually said 8Y (a taxi would have been cheaper!) and all the other Chinese thought this was hilarious. When he dropped us off he even told another rickshaw driver what we had paid and they had another laugh at us! Oh well, it was only 80p after all. The Monastery was ok but a bit of a disappointment after seeing the previous two temples.
On our last night in Chengdu we realised that we weren’t doing too bad budget wise and decided to go for a meal at a proper Chinese restaurant rather than a simple eatery, plus we needed a break from the pot noodle. We went to a hotpot restaurant near the hostel, Sichuan province is famous for its hot food so it felt like the right choice. At this restaurant I had meltdown number 2 much to Ahmad’s amusement. A lady came over and asked which hotpot we wanted straight away and thrust the one English menu they had under my nose. I wanted to look at the whole menu before deciding but she wouldn’t let me turn the page and kept pointing to ‘spicy hotpot’. At this point about 5 waitresses came to watch this spectacle and I couldn’t concentrate so I threw the menu to Ahmad. He picked a hotpot which the staff classed as medium heat and then gave the menu back to me to pick the side dishes. All the time the lady was peering over my shoulder waiting for the order but then I couldn’t concentrate again and just picked beef and cabbage before throwing the menu back to Ahmad. He picked bamboo shoots just because the lady suggested it and she went away. Meanwhile two waitresses just stood there staring! Ahmad said that the look of confusion and frustration on my face was priceless. The famous hotpot arrived and it looked absolutely terrifying! There must have been 200 black pepper corns and 50 red chillies (with seeds) swimming in it. Luckily this concoction was in a steel bowl within a larger bowl with just chicken stock. The side dishes came and Ahmad dumped his share into the bowl of death and I put mine in the stock. The waitresses were still staring which then meant that my already mediocre chopstick skills were made even worse – it was like eating under pressure! Ahmad was sweating like a beast (even curry in India wasn’t this harsh!) and ate like a true pro. Afterwards he noticed that the locals were putting their food in the stock and simply dipping it in the spicy liquid! They must have thought we were insane!
We headed to Xian next to see the Terracotta Warriors and experience our first Chinese trains!