2 Days in Chengdu, Chengdu, China

Chengdu is in the Sichuan province of China around 1.5 hour's flight from Xi'an and is probably most famous for the Giant Panda Breeding Research Base, but it is also full of other unexpected surprises.

Now, I don’t know about you, but when we first heard of this City, we thought it would be small, maybe in the middle of nowhere, perhaps a bit rural; we didn’t even think there would be cash point machines so we made sure we had enough currency in our wallets just in case we ran out.

Out of all of the cities we had visited on our 18 day tour of China, Chengdu was definitely the most opulent! It’s a cosmopolitan Chinese metropolis which includes multiple ring roads and colossal malls with international high end brand-name stores. We stayed at the Yinhe Dynasty Hotel on a street filled with shops selling gold bars, the wealth in these shops was so great, there were security guards on every door.

We were told that not so long ago, the government pulled down all the old buildings and “re-branded” the city for investors which is why it has become a place of designer shops, skyscrapers and corporate industries such as IBM, Dell and Apple.

As mentioned, Chengdu is in the Sichuan Province and Sichuan food is known for being spicy yet flavoursome with Sichuan pepper and chillies used in almost every dish. Out of all the provinces, this was the one Sy was looking forward to because he loves spicy food and yes, one dish made his face numb so he was a happy man! Most of the food was rather tasty and we enjoyed a lovely stew of some sort at our hotel, although, I have to confess that we were unsure what the meat actually was; we think it may have been horse because it was lean and rather yummy but also next to it was a sign showing “marinated assmeat”! ...... (follow the instructions below for accessing the rest of this article).