Parks, Temples and Pizza Hut

Chengdu Trip - Walking around the City

After coming back to Chengdu a day earlier, we needed something to keep us busy for the 2 days until our flight, so we set out walking around the city and seeing all the attractions on the map that our hostel gave us. We woke up Friday morning and I couldn't put weight on my legs for at least 20 minutes because they were so sore from the mountain and we didn't even hike the whole thing! Once we could walk again, we got breakfast and headed to our first stop - the biggest Mao statue in China. It was cool monument, but there wasn't really anything to do there other than look at it and take pictures.

We then headed over to People's Park, a cool park filled with old ladies doing their Tai Chi and a kids amusement park (both staples of Chinese parks).

SO GREEN!

From there, we headed to "China Lane", a souvenir street filled with panda stores and old style buildings and restaurants. We really liked the area and walked around the whole thing, getting sandwiches from Starbucks for lunch! I also was able to get some postcards and Joe got a map like the ones he's been collecting from every city we've visited. 

There was some cool wall art like this one, where part of it was painted and part was coming out of the wall!

Can't get away from them!

Joe was having fun with his camera taking pictures of me..

Weird name for a coffee shop and pub, but OK

After some shopping, we headed to yet another park called the Culture Park, where we knew there was a huge Taoist Temple nearby. It took us forever to find the temple, but walking through the area was cool and the park was beautiful again.

Kids bottle feeding some fish, a sight I'd never seen before!

An old style street by the temple.

No temple visit is complete without some statue pics!

People on a tour walking across the middle of the yin-yang on the floor.. not really sure what the significance was.

Part of the temple was lined with Monkey statues, which we had to take pictures of seeing as we were both born in the year of the monkey!

After the temple, we both couldn't walk anymore and our backs were killing us from carrying around our backpacks, so we headed to our original Chengdu hostel where we had reservations for the night. We took a nap and then went to a free dumpling party put on by the hostel where we made fun shaped dumplings with the other guests, some of whom were children travelling with their families which was fun. Joe and I both won a "most creative" dumpling contest with his face-shaped one and my rabbit dumpling. After that, we walked around the pedestrian area by our hostel and ate some popcorn that we bought from a movie theater - dinner of champions.

The next day, we woke up and went to a bamboo park which was really cool and as you can imagine, filled with all different kinds of bamboo. It was definitely my favorite park that we went to and we had great weather for walking around!

The bamboo was so thick!

A lady drawing the bamboo.. living the life!

Crazy walkway full of curved trees.

Posing like a Chinese girl

Even Chinese grannies get in on the posing!

A lot of the bamboo was carved with Chinese and people's names, so we decided to contribute too!

A typical sight in China - a girl dressed up as an anime character.

After the bamboo park, we headed to a shopping mall for lunch and ended up at Pizza Hut, one of the few western restaurants we hadn't been to before. It only had 1 page of pizza in the whole menu which was surprising, but the pizza was exactly what we needed after the long week we'd had. 

FEED ME!

What? A sign by where we were walking.

After lunch, we headed to our last tourist destination, a monastery and temple area which was again surrounded by a park. We got to see some nuns and monks chanting which was cool and something we hadn't seen at the other temples before. By the time we had walked through the area, we were exhausted and went back to our hostel to relax for the rest of the day and wait for our flight that night.

This boy was walking his dog around like this, holding onto his paws behind his back - it made for a pretty funny sight.

The temple inside the monastery where they were all chanting.

Joe and a statue of an animal made up of many different real and mythical beasts.

Overall, we really enjoyed Chengdu as a city. It was very modern, well organized and clean. Out of the cities we've been to, it has been our favorite by far next to Shanghai. There was little pollution in the area and so many different places to go and see!