Aidao Nunnery, which we just stumbled on while walking to a monastery
Tourists come to Chengdu, capital of Sichuan Province, for one primary reason: to see the pandas. There are fewer than 2,000 giant pandas in the world and perhaps 80 percent of them are in Sichuan. Now, you’re not going to see them in the wild, but back in the 1980s Chengdu built the Chengdu Panda Base for research and – presumably – tourists. We’d already seen it, though, when we were here in 2015, and there’s only so many times you need to see a panda zoo in a two-year period. For us, that would be precisely once, so we didn’t go out there.
We came here, instead, for a remarkably prosaic reason: it’s where the flight went. From Shangri-La you can fly to three cities: Kunming (already been there twice this trip), Lhasa (wrong direction; it’s west of Shangri-La and we want to go east), and Chengdu. So we went to Chengdu. We could have caught a connecting flight on, but we hate doing that so we spent three nights here.
Sichuan Province may have the hottest, spiciest, and tastiest food on earth. This fish dish was loaded with the kind of Sichuan peppers that leave your lips just numb. Oddly, though, except for this place we had a bit of trouble finding good food in Chengdu and in fact had what was undoubtedly the most boring meal of our three-plus weeks in China here.
But for the panda zoo and Mount Qingcheng – another day trip from Chengdu we did two years ago – there’s really not that much of interest in here. It’s just a big, not terribly attractive city of 10 million people. To add to the sense of boredom, Mark was recovering from the sprained ankle he’d acquired the morning that we were flying here. The good news was that we had a gorgeous suite at the St. Regis, thanks to Starwood’s generous upgrade policy. It made hanging around and not doing much except reveling in the Republican melt down over repealing Obamacare relatively pleasant.
The grounds of Wenshu Temple create a little slice of calm in Chengdu
We love China. Sometimes, at least.
No, Steve Jobs didn’t rise from the dead in Chengdu. Right across the street from our hotel was an imitation Apple Store. I went in to see if I needed anything and discovered this mini Apple Museum. It was actually really fun to walk through the history of Apple, seeing a bunch of the old Apple products and pictures of Steve Jobs as he aged, got heavy, and then got thin.
And then imagine how excited I was to discover the very Macintosh – with one whole MB of RAM! – that Mark had when we were in graduate school
Wenshu Temple
More of Wenshu Temple
The streets of Chengdu could be interesting. Here’s an itinerant peddler selling fresh chickens. Never thought of just buying a dead, cleaned chicken from a guy on a scooter before.
You meet the most interesting people on the streets of Chengdu
And then there was the street we were walking down that turned into al fresco dining. We’re familiar with sidewalk restaurants, but in this one spot – we didn’t see it anywhere else – they’d spilled over the sidewalks and way out onto the street. Strange.