Day 5 & 6 — Chengdu 2 spicy 4 me
Haven’t had the best internet connection and we need a VPN to actually access most things due to the “Great Firewall”
We started the day 5 by sleeping in until 1pm due to our previous flight delay.
We then proceeded to pig out on spicy noodles.
The spiciest of noodles! This one is my personal favorite, called “Dan Dan noodles” which is minced pork with peppercorns and chili peppers. I think this is a quintessential spicy dish of Sichuan province and will make your mouth water from the spicyness and the yummyness.
Just walking around, we found a lot of these drink shops and decided to try some. It was actually pretty tasty and tasted like it was made with real fruit! Pretty cheap too, around $1–2 USD.
Taking some photos with some minions! Chinese people LOVE minions.
One of the funniest things was while taking these minion photos, we actually met a Chinese girl who was obsessed with koreans and Korean culture. She asked for wechat and tried to hang out with us as we had a few Koreans travelling with us.
This may look like some spiritual site… but its actually just a walkpath for a mall area we visited 😱
In the afternoon, we walked around Kuan Zhai street (translates to wide narrow street), which is a tourist street with lots of street food vendors surrounded by bamboo and had an “ancient” vibe to it.
So much street food! There’s too much to even take pictures of and describe. A lot of this is overpriced on this street since it is a tourist attraction but I’d still highly recommend buying as much as you can. Relative to American prices, its all still pretty cheap. $1–2 USD per item.
One item I’d recommend is this fried tofu! It’s heavily salted and spiced with paprika and chili flakes. It’s really good and gives you a good intro to a “spicy” dish (not very spicy compared to other things though…)
Not really sure what this door is supposed to represent so I’ll just caption it “culture”.
We also randomly decided to try a “chizza” from KFC. For reference, Chinese people LOVE their KFC. This seems like an almost American abomination where a piece of fried chicken is the base of the pizza. It looks horrible. It tastes alright though. I probably wouldn’t get it again but I don’t regret it.
Later on in the night, we ended up on JinLi street, which is another tourist attraction of street food vendors.
Was a super crowded place but had that nice ancient Chinese night market vibe.
More street food! The noodles were just alright and was a “spicy sweet” noodle. The sweetness I think threw it off. The buns on the other hand were pretty good! There was minced pork on the inside and the bottom was pan fried!
More tight alleyways of JinLi street. It was fun to just get lost and find unique things.
In the evening, we got Sichuan Spicy Hot Pot, which is another specialty of the region. This is basically a giant pot of boiling soup and chili oils. We got level 1 spicy (the lowest) and oh my god was it still friggin spicy. I love spicy foods but this was a lot! I was able to manage it for the most part but I am pretty confident I would die on level 3.
For the uninitiated, you eat hot pot by taking raw meats and veggies and just boiling it until cooked. It lets the flavors of all the broth, spices, and other ingredients mix and cook into the food! It’s a sharing kind of meal.
For day 6, we started off with PANDAS!!!
Chengdu area is actually where the pandas cal home and about 30 minutes drive outside the city, there’s a giant panda research center where you can view pandas.
This one is sleeping like he’s hungover.
Pandas are low key REALLY clunsy and stupid. And that’s why they’re so lovable! They fall off things, they have trouble climbing, and eat all the things.
We even got to see tiny baby pandas that were incubating!
For me, this was the highlight dinner. This is the specialty: La Zi Ji (which translates to spicy chicken). It’s really tasty with fried chicken bits!
One kinda weird thing that we had was wild rabbit. It was not that bad (although the bunny we ate was probably cute). Tasted similar to duck.
We also got some Mapo Tofu, which is a classic sichuan spicy dish.
Later on, we went to the Tibetan quarters of Chengdu. Chengdu is actually one of main entry ways to get into Tibetan, so there’s naturally a lot of Tibetan people. Lots of temples and religious trinkets.
Temples and monks! Although it was interesting that there were lots of police. I assume its because of protests for/against Tibet, so the police are there to keep the peace.
