Chongqing

Chongqing has been a chill sleepy girl portion of the trip. Took it a little slower, recuperation mode. Marty the Sim's bar is back to green. Shoutout to our taxi driver on the drive in who clearly thought I looked peaky and offered me cigarettes to smoke in the back of the car.

Cyberpunk, 8D, mountain city

Chongqing has a load of nicknames, which honestly all track - it's really really wild. It's very much its own place.

1. The hills
   • The city is built into the side of mountains, and the different levels are crazy. You'll leave one building on the ground floor, walk across a square, and realise there is a road 22 floors below you. Driving anywhere you spend most of your time going round and round spiral roads to get higher or lower.
   • I popped to the hotel gym for the first time since I left home, and let me tell you the Chongqing stairs after leg day were a bitch (and the squat toilets were the end of me).
2. The lights
   • Chongqing at night is an insane multimedia experience. All the building lights have party vibes programmed into them. On Saturday night we caught a drone show where like 5000 drones boogied about on the river. Most of it was telling a story about a sea monster, but my favourite was the five frames at the end advertising a car in the sky. 0 to 60 in 3.59 seconds.

3. The Vegas of hotpot
   • So Sichuan is famous for spicy hotpot, and Chongqing is home to true hotpot Vegas. We went to a Guinness world record winning spot in the side of a mountain with 800 tables, and mental lights, waterfalls, fish tanks. Conveniently they encapsulate the spicy hotpot broth away from the chill mild one. Favourite part was a smiley robot delivering us prawns and a bunch of flowers and people wandering up to tables with karaoke backpacks so the uncs could get a tune in.

As part of our regularly scheduled best snack updates, other highlights include:

• Mala noodle soup (mala means the classic Sichuan flavour combo of numbing from peppercorns (ma) and spicy as fuck (la). We had these for breakfast at our hotel every day, but our fave was a side of the road portion for 80p.
• Delicious street - this is a literal maze of a food market in central Chongqing across 4 floors that you get entirely lost in. All these vendors have Britney mics and are shouting about how tasty their snacks are. We ate some crazy good duck pancakes (the pancake was fresh and way chewier and tastier our local London chinese takeaway) and this insane braised pork pasty, it was almost like a fatty pork taco.

• Cocoa nib pocky - this feels way more Japanese than Chinese but we have consumed so many packets of these little sticks from the shop next to our hotel. Unexpected hero.

It's also wild how cheap all these snacks are. Lunches cost like £2.50 between us, and a dinner with beers is £8. Mental.

Earth 2

The wildness of China compared to anywhere I have ever travelled has not worn off in Chongqing. I guess it's so separate from the western world that it kind of feels like being in Sims or some fake earth that randomly regenerated all the stuff I'm used to, where none of the cars or apps are the same. Some more funny things:

1. Celeb status continues
   • I thought the novelty of me would wear off in a big city, but nope. Funniest encounter was accidentally getting pulled into a street interview after a girl asked if she could speak to us in English. She thought it was absolutely wild that I kept smiling. She literally couldn't get over it. She said it's probably because in China they have to work 996 (9am-9pm, 6 days). She also said I was far too beautiful to be a software engineer so maybe time to quit the grind.
2. Communism, the musical
   • A classic activity here is going to the Chongqing 1949 musical. It basically tells the story of the liberation of Chongqing from the Kuomintang - it was the last city they held before fleeing to Taiwan, but they had a lot of ammo and many communist fighters caught in their prisons so it was a drawn out drama. It felt like such a mad switcheroo of western media - the capitalist Kuomintang are portrayed as insanely evil death soldiers, and the communist fighters are literal angels dangling from the sky.

• The production of the show is insane. The entire stage rotates 360 degrees and your seats do also. A full 8D multimedia experience to really get the message drilled into you.
• My vibe after reading my China history book (here I go again) is that the initial communist takeover seemed quite legendary (also particularly for women). But stuff definitely went quite rogue later on.

3. Adventures in Google translate
   • So naturally I didn't start learning Mandarin at a sensible time, and Google translate is heavily relied on. But I literally can't overstate how terrible any translation is. You'll be speaking to someone staring at you like you're dumb whilst you look at your phone and it makes literally no sense. I went to get my nails redid, and it was a true mission. 4 people staring at me wondering why I was confused when this is all I can read:

• That said, it was worth being laughed at because for a slay nail set at the mental mental price of 13 quid.

• But generally funny translation has been a constant source of amusement and drama.

Everything is different but also some stuff is kind of the same. Max found a gig whilst we were in town at Nuts Livehouse - a classic Chongqing spot, and somehow the final ever gig before they changed venues. Played some table football, had a few beers, almost got taken out by an Oolong highball. The band were from Wuhan, very guitarry and vibey. I'm terrible at describing music but Max says they are like Chinese American football. I thought they were great, and then it turned out that we'd only been watching the support. It's hard to keep track when you have no idea what they're saying. They kinda slapped more than the actual band. There was a lil more polite clapping and less screaming and beer on the floor than London.

Hot hot springs

My favourite part of most trips is always going to the local bath experience. Chongqing is surrounded by many natural hot springs, where the water comes out of the ground at like 55 degrees, just like hotpot.

We visited a couple, but my favourite was the inner city spring that we basically rolled to after consuming a lot of hotpot at about 10pm. Spent an hour hopping through various temperatures of water and Chinese medicine baths outside, whilst it torrentially rained, and you were surrounded by all these lit up skyscrapers.

The spas are really hard to get right, you constantly have shoes on in the wrong place, or wear wet clothes in the wrong area and have random attendants shout at you.

Best part of this one was the post spa routine - you have a sit down shower (the dream when you are sleepy and full of hotpot). Meanwhile an auntie is mopping the floor and singing to herself. All the girlies are putting their sheet masks on. Then you put on these ugly ass silky matching pyjamas to get back to your locker.

To Chengdu

We're onto our final China stop! We've taken the train a couple hours to another city in Sichuan - this time Chengdu - city of Pandas and capital of gay China, slay.