Chengdu

The second stop on our week-long trip took us to Chengdu, a city known for its spicy cuisine and final resting place on the trail to Tibet.  We didn’t have time for the latter but indulged, probably a bit too much, on the former.  And again, like you cannot really explain, I fell in love almost immediately with Chengdu.  It’s recently been voted China’s fourth most livable city and you can understand why.

It’s clean, people are friendly, there’s lots of green space, lots of delicious street food and a delightful panda sanctuary just on the outskirts of town, or as far as you can call a city with a population of 14 million ‘town’.  If that doesn’t convince, perhaps that the world’s biggest statue of Mao lives here might do the trick. 

It helped that our hostel, Flip Flop Hostel, was awesome.  I reserve that word for only the truly awesome.  But the location, the staff, the rooms, the lounge space, the tours, were just that.  And it was less hostely in the fact that we stayed in a double and a triple room with just our travel mates.  No bunk beds, no 4am I got home really drunk so let’s turn the lights on moments. 

On our first evening we wandered to a famous series of alleyways called Kuanzhai Xiangzi or ‘The Wide and Narrow Alleys’.  Impossible for it be both these things, we were greeted with narrow lanes recently preserved and dating back as far as the Qing Dynasty.  If you’re not up on your dynasties, that one ran from 1616-1911.  Locals and Chinese tourists fell in love with taking pictures with various old world scenes painted on the brickwork along the lanes and we meandered our way to a Hotpot restaurant located just on the edge of one alleyway or another.  The outdoor patio was heaving with locals which is always a sign that the food must be good. 

 

So we sat down at a hotpot table, essentially a gigantic square picnic table with a circular depression in the middle and a gas stove under it.  We were approached by a waitress who spoke at us; we tried to communicate and we failed spectacularly.  This was the waitress’s cue to hand us the menu—generally not a problem due to the Chinese people’s love for picture menus.

This menu was a piece of A4 paper covered in mandarin characters.  Our language lessons didn’t extend this far and despite our best efforts to play matching games with our pocket dictionary, we couldn’t read a thing.  Nothing.

We looked around desperately trying to make the meal a success.  This was made more difficult by the fact that hot pot is not a meal you order individually.  Essentially, you order a broth—hot, very hot or a combination of both, and then you choose the vegetables, meat and other condiments you want to dip into it.  It’s a bit like making a giant vat of soup at your table only you don’t drink the broth.  We pointed, we stuttered, we failed. 

And finally Aine personed up and grabbed our waitress by the arm and dragged her to various tables across the patio.  She nosed her way in pointing at other seated customers’ trays of mushrooms, lotus root, tofu.  She moved her again and again until we thought we had enough. 

It was then that the family seated next to us took pity on our souls and offered up their ten-year-old daughter: ‘Can I help you?’  We almost cried.  And this kind, chubby, beautiful little girl helped us order noodles, courgette, beer.  We communicated our thanks, took pictures with the family and accepted their gift of figs bought from a man wandering past the terrace. 

When our hotpot broth arrived I can only comment on the fact that hot was an understatement.  Half of our concoction was laden with finger chilies, more than a hundred of them.  The cursory chopstick dip into the pot yielded the fire of a thousand suns, to quote both Shakespeare and Ten Things I Hate About You.  We dropped the odd noodle in, for experiment’s sake.   Once was all it took to understand that that was a silly thing to do.

2 hours and 60RMB (£6/$4) later, we ambled into the night to enjoy a little passagata home. Chengdu, we're charmed.