Chengdu

Guys we love Chengdu big time. Last week I said it was the centre of pandas and the capital of gay China, turns out it's also the city of pure aura. The kinda place that makes you wanna stay 3 more days with no plans because walking about and seeing what you find is so fun. We were staying in Yulin, and it just made me wanna do nothing but mooch about and live the sweet sweet Chengdu life. An honestly wildly flat city compared to Chongqing, it took my eyes time to adjust to lack of hill. What it lacks in terrain it wins in vibe.

## What went down I am struggling to link this shit together in a coherent fashion because it was so varied in energy, but here are a few things I loved:

The People's Park

I'm sure this was renamed in the cultural revolution to be more communism coded, but it truly is the people's park. There's big groups of old ladies blasting tunes and doing very synchro choreo, Tai Chi people doing one legged slow kicks, everyone's just out enjoying the vibes.
It's also the home of Love Alley, which is about 2000 pieces of laminated paper strung up.

They're all either pink or blue, where mums write up their kid's dating profile and what they're looking for, so you can just walk up and down seeing if anyone fits your vibe, it's literally packed out with mums shopping around.

Our final stop here was the old tea house, which is approx 200 tables outside where you get a thermos and some leaves and have a big chat with your buddies. Everyone is smoking or eating their snacks out of tupperwares and having a silly little time.

Hoopers

Max has literally been DYING to go and see the Sichuan Blue Whale play in the CBA (their basketball league). It turns out they are the worst team in the league by a really long way, they've lost all 34 of the games they've played this season, it's kinda impressive. Venue felt like a school sports hall and I was hoping for better snacks but I hear the basketball was pretty solid (from the other team at least). Maybe 30% of the players are shipped in from America and they get Chinese names too.

My favourite bit of the league is the team names, idk if it's just bad translation but it's got me cracking up. First you've got your Lions, then you've also got your Gold Lions, but it's important not to forget the Long Lions. We've got Leopards and Flying Leopards, we've got Dragons, Fly Dragons, Brave Dragons, and then your Southern Tigers, Northeast Tigers, and of course Flying Tigers. Shoutout to the Blue Whale for having a little originality at least.

More pandas than people

So Sichuan is home to 80% of the world's wild pandas, I think around 1500. Chengdu has like 20 million humans. But I am literally so convinced that there is about 100 panda themed items for every person. Every single street has at least one panda shop that is entirely and completely full of panda merch. Panda pen. Panda backpack, panda ice cream, panda ears, it's literally endless.

We popped to a panda wildlife spot a little out of the city, and I was actually so taken by those big stupid guys. Not gonna lie I've always been kind of a hater of pandas as iconography, it's kinda like my issues with penguins. I've never vibed so I didn't think I'd be blown away by their vibes but IRL these guys are insane I'm so into them. Like what do you mean that's an animal that can exist in the wild and exists because of evolution. They're so chill they love napping on shelves and cracking bamboo, I love their lil paws.

The capital of Gay China

So Chengdu is famously gay, and it's very iconic for it. I think the culture emerged because it's always been a more liberal place, far from Beijing and any rules there, and it's always been a more relaxed vibe, with a big culture of hanging out in tea houses.

We had a medium large night hopping about bars in Yulin before heading out to the Chengdu strip. Went to a club where there's like 6 dudes who are begging the DJ to play their request, and then absolutely pop off with matching choreo to K-POP. My fave was a very heavily leather clad dance to It's Raining Men. Meanwhile, crowd are mostly nonplussed having a chat on their tables, I guess it's just like that every night.

They also love to throw red paper everywhere, and hand out long wiggly balloons to bop about with. Turns out like 90% of the crowd know how to make sick balloon animals, please teach me.

Dripped out monks

So on one of our long mooches we stumble upon this street with rows and rows of shops selling monk shit. As we continue wandering, it seems to stretch for a massive area, just monk shit on monk shit. It was giving Little Tibet maybe.

There's shops with all sorts of shrine items, flags, etc. But my favourite are the clothes shops. They have every single clothing item you could imagine, but exclusively in the classic monk colours of mustard yellow/orange/burgundy. But guys, they literally so dripped out. There's every colour of monk vest, monk tee, monk scarf, but there's also so much monk gorp core - they've got the colour scheme arcteryx, the fleeces, the monk Nike beanies. Maybe I can become a monk, kinda fits with my diagnosis as a deep autumn colour palette so I would probably slay.

Cheffing it up

One of our Chengdu evenings was spent at a Sichuan cooking class with a dude called Lance. We cheffed up an assortment of classic Sichuan numbers - mapo tofu, twice cooked pork, sweet and numbing aubergine, spicy cabbage, and smacked cucumber with our dude, we were cooking, they all slapped.

Max is much more at home with a wok than your girl but I made it through. I learnt that the Chinese cooking process is a bit too fast and hot for me, I prefer Chinese eating. Also learnt the prevalence of chicken essence in Chinese cooking which was new to me - they put these lil sesame seed size granules of stock in everything.

Aside from the cooking though, there was a lot of cool shit along the way.

1. The food market
   • This was my favourite part - we spent ages meandering round all the stalls in the local market whilst our dude told us what was what. China still has a massive culture of going to sellers at the local market to get your produce rather than the supermarket which was really cool honestly. There's individual people for fruit, veg, meat, eggs, spices, herbs. Learnt so many cool things about their produce, my highlights were:
   • The egg stall which had approximately 15 types of eggs - pigeon and pheasant included.
   • Baby garlic, it looks like a big garlic but it's just a single clove so you don't have to peel all the individual ones
   • Winter melon. This shit is the biggest vegetable you've ever seen. Like would win the prize vegetable contest in Wallace and Gromit levels.
   • Enoki mushrooms are called See you tomorrow mushroom in Chinese because they're hard to digest, lol.

2. Downton Abbey boy
   • So picture this, we're walking through these backstreets of some random spot in Chengdu, and Lance says "oh yeah this guy loves British people". It's just some random teenager running his mums stall, turns out he's watched all of Downton Abbey 5x and is obsessed with posh British people. The way he said "It's simply a pleasure to meet you" was SO GOOD I was floored. Truly such a niche vibe.
3. Chinese nicknames
   • So our boy was telling us about how Chinese people have nicknames for western celebs because their names are too long and hard to pronounce and I'm so obsessed. They're based on how their name sounds in Chinese, or their vibe, or a combo. Leonardo DiCaprio is Little Plum, Tom Cruise is Brother Tom, Eddie Redmayne is Little Freckle, and Jennifer Lawrence is Big Cousin, I literally can't deal. You gotta look these up and have a giggle.

Other Chengdu food shoutouts include

• Beef fat skewers (bit my tongue so hard eating these I think I did lasting damage, but we ordered 3 more).

• Fresh strawbs - they're so in season and every corner you can buy a massive punnet for 60p. Sorted me out when I was in the trenches of my gay china hangover

• Dan dan noodles - these are crispy crunchy peanutty spicy noodles and they hit so hard. Interestingly Sichuan eats barely any rice, everything there is noodle.
• Tasting Pu-erh tea - this is a fermented mellow tea that comes in a cake. Went to a wholesale tea market, lady fed us about 20 cups each from her clay teapot to see what we liked best. Max is buzzing about his cake.

A very Chinese time in my life

That's it for China, leg 2 complete!! Guys I literally love China it's for sure top of my list to go back to. To quote the meme you truly are meeting us at a very Chinese time in my life (how relevant that Max just found out he is 7% Chinese for real I guess it tracks). Some final observations that I have loved:

• Auspiscious numbers
  • So I think, 4 is bad, 8 is good. You won't see 4s anywhere - basketball numbers, hotel floors, etc. But 8 is legit everywhere. At all our hotels no matter what floor you're on, your room number starts with 8. 8223 is 2nd floor, 8516 is 5th, I love it.
• Landlords
  • Everyone everywhere is sitting on little plastic stools plying cards on the street with little bets. Apparently their favourite game is called landlord, iconically anti capitalism. I wanna learn it.
• The fits
  • I love the outfits. First fave goes to the number of entirely mismatched best friends walking around together. One will be dressed entirely normally, and the other will be in a full head to toe witch fit, or look like a literal toy doll, slay.
  • Also obsessed with all the girliepops walking around with a single roller in their fringe that they leave in for style. Very scouse.
• Pronunciation
  • Public apology to Max because I've been telling him he's pronouncing "thank you" wrong the entire time we've been here. Cut to Chengdu where our buddy Lance tells me I'm saying it the Taiwanese way and he's right :-)

Spent my plane out of China with Sichuan airlines, who offer you a tablespoon of crispy chilli oil from the jar on top of your aeroplane dinner, I want this service everywhere. Sat with 2 Chinese girls and they told me all about where else I should go in China, and have just sent me their Bali photos, so cute.

Massive huge shoutout to Max for making leg 2 so legendary, I can't overstate how warped the scales of planning and research were, and he cooked up literally the perfect China itinerary and made sure we had all the right apps so we could actually exist and do things.

Time to go and find myself surfing and yogaing, see you on the flip side.