Friday 31 October 2025
It was very wet first thing so we needed to find an indoor activity. JC really wanted to visit the Sanxingdui Museum which hosts a plethora of bronze masks, but it was an hour+ each way on the metro and pretty niche in my eyes (history museums were one thing, but an ancient mask museum was a notch up I wasn't born for). So we compromised and went to the Chengdu Museum. We spent most of our time on the ancient history floor which did have a bronze mask or two.
I really was quite ancient history-ed out by this stage. On the left is a bronze zhan from the Spring and Autumn Warring States Period (770-221 BCE). I liked the stone rhino.
And there were plenty of pottery figurines.
After a couple of hours here we headed down to a food street next to Chengdu Wu Hou Shrine. It was touristy (said we the tourists) but it was interesting to shuffle through. I do like an old door. I found some random veggie skewers to eat which I thought would be hot but they were raw. Crunchy lunchy.
We enjoyed a stroll around Wu You Shrine/Temple. The gardens were remarkably peaceful on the whole, as the tourists congregated around the main entrance and a bit of the red wall.
We left and walked up through a local park then realised we couldn't get out except by retracing our steps, so we had to loop back via the food alley.
We headed up to People's Park to a tea room JC remembered from his last visit, spotting live fish for sale on a bridge as we passed. We could have also picked up a live terrapin from the vendor.
Heming Tea Room was a large, busy establishment. We settled in and people-watched, which was a lot of fun.
We'd gone for a cheap cuppa, 30 RMB each (~£3) but if you wanted to splash out you could be served your drink by the tea master from a long spouted kettle, which was certainly a performance.
You could also get your ear wax removed whilst you sat. We saw this happen in other tea houses and is definitely a thing to do over a cuppa.
People's Park was a pleasant stroll.
Next up was 'wide and narrow alley', which are 3 parallel pedestrian alleys crammed full of (mainly) tourist shops It was heaving with tourists, unsurprising for a Friday evening, but glitzy sparkly ;-). Chengdu is famous for its panda breeding centre so there are pandas everywhere. JC discovered a Starbucks in all the hustle and bustle and popped in for 15 mins of peace.
Once we'd had our filled of tourist retail we hopped on the metro to find a confluence of rivers that looked worth visiting. I did enjoy the metro card designs (I think I blogged similar excitement last year).
The Jinjiang River was nicely lit up and quite picturesque. Parts of the waterfront were rammed with Chinese celebrating Halloween - there were some amazing costumes!
The walkways and vista was certainly fun to explore.
As it was our last night, we splashed out on a final hot pot. I was fascinated by the DNA-esque look of the tofu.
Saturday 01 November 2025
Home time. For once, we didn't have an early start so pottered around the Wenshu Monastery for a bit before catching the train to the airport. We checked in OK and, once on the plane, discovered we had been allocated two seats in a row of 3, with the middle seat empty. How lovely. It became incredibly handy when, very early into the flight, I chucked yoghurt over myself, the seat and seatbelt: I had to move across to the empty seat as mine was too wet to sit on. I took about 6 hours to dry too.
Our in-flight map got stuck over Russia - we were in our final descent, it stated "landing in 26 minutes" but the display suggested we were nowhere near! Never trust a map...
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