Chengdu Panda behavior

To Celebrate our May holidays we traveled with a group of six to Chengdu to behold the pandas and stuff our faces with spicy food. We stayed for a long weekend, took a day trip to Leshan Big Buddha and actually just chilled a lot.

What was memorable? The sweet water noodles at 洞子口张老二凉粉, OMG thinking back at those noodles still put me in higher sphered. This is the address in Chinese. GO! What I would recommend? Just order them all and try them out :):). No regrets.

One of Chengdu’s greatest attractions is having spicy hot pot dinners while viewing the operas, we just didn’t plan well enough and didn’t reserve our spots so unfortunately didn’t have the time to join (learn from this mistake!). Another must do, we actually didn’t try through lack of time and organization, was to experience the traditional “Chengdu way of ear cleaning”. I think we actually were too pussy to try it out.. which I in hindsight regret (learn from this mistake too!).

What we did enjoy to the fullest were the spaaaaaaaaaaaaaaicieeeeeee hot pots they are known for. One of their most famous hot pot places is the Da Miao hot pot, we went to the one in TaiKooli for which we had to queue up for 3,5 hours (!). Whether it was worth it? Probably not if you’re not into hot pot and really spicy food.. it just tasted like the hot pot we had the day before at a random place the night before. But if you have a severe case of FOMO, stick it out, have some cocktails in the mean time and sniff that shichuan pepper all up. If you’re around after, go to  the Temple House for drinks, it’s a fancy bar/hotel and serves good cocktails and has a nice outside patio.

Then the pandas: they were supercute and amazing. Go as early as possible – you’ll have the pandas for yourself. It soon got crowded and queues were everywhere. The baby pandas are the most worth to visit and linger around on.

Other things that were on the list but we didn’t do, but potentials for other Chengdu-visitors

• Kuan Zhai Xiang Zi and Jin Li for culture, food and bar
• Wu Hou Shrine for historical culture
• Due Fu Cottage, a historical park museum about a poet in the Tang Dynstay