From the climbing area north of Chengdu, we continued our way to Chengdu, our first real Chinese megacity. It was crazy: more than a hundred kilometers before the city center, the urban sprawl had already started—not Chengdu itself yet, just the surrounding big cities that merge into one massive metropolis. Some facts: 22 million residents, 15,000 square kilometers, 1,500 people per square kilometer, and the panda capital of the world with hundreds of living pandas and infinite artificial ones!
We found a nice parking spot in the city center and took a walk around. The first highlight was a live TikTok performance by two locals in a pedestrian zone, followed by a livestream chat with their followers.
Cute stuff everywhere! This was the storage box of an e-scooter.
When we entered China, Racki and I decided to save all the big-city activities for the first major metropolis we reached and here we were! So, we headed to one of the biggest malls we could find.
PANDAS! PANDAS! PANDAS!
More cute stuff.
Virtual reality play zone. Looks like a new kind of zombies, but it was fun.
Sci-fi fashion store.
A luxury electric car packed with fancy gadgets and tons of screens. Our favorite feature: selecting emojis to display on the car’s taillights.
Ice skating (we are still in the mall) …
… and ice eating.
The Chinese version of french fries. Very spicy!
The metro system was awesome, super cheap, and full of smombies (just like everywhere else in the world, I guess).
Together with two other clients and two super friendly ladies from our Chinese travel agency, we had a magnificent and delicious hot pot dinner, and the agency even treated us to it. The other travelers had driven their van all the way from Australia and had just passed through Laos, so it was fascinating to hear what lay ahead of us. Of course, it was also great chatting with our guides about their lives in China, their dreams, and everything in between. But some questions we just couldn’t explain or communicate, lost in translation.
After dinner, we got free tickets to a traditional Chinese theater performance. It was…
… colorful and, aside from a few moments, very, very, very different from a similar evening out in Germany.
The long feathers.
These performers are putting on an adaptation of Journey to the West: a badass pig guy causes trouble, gets defeated by the Monkey King and his monkey gang, joins a monk, and becomes a Buddhist.
PANDA! But a cool one!
Another classic skit: a Chinese husband sneaks out to gamble, loses all of his and his wife’s money, crawls back home, and gets punished by his wife, who makes him perform ridiculous tricks.
Classic fire show.
The grand finale!
I also got a traditional ear cleaning. Very interesting—especially at the end, when the practitioner used something like a tuning fork, not to make a sound, but to transfer vibrations directly into my eardrum.
China was so different in so many ways. For instance, they have their own mega online marketplaces (“same same, but different” from Amazon). Our favorite was Taobao. We found so many super useful items that we could never find in other countries—like this ultra-robust new shower and cleaning water bag, which is normally used for fuel.
Or these extremely useful and cute Tiny Whoops!
Since getting them, I’ve loved practicing flying and improving my first-person-view (FPV) maneuvers…
… and crashes. The little drones love the grass.
Another thing we planned to do was meet some robots. In the end, it wasn’t as easy to find them as I had guessed, but Racki tracked down a small robot exhibition where we had some interesting conversations with them. Always remember: be nice to robots and AIs—maybe they will remember and spare you in the future!
China is full of extremes and a wild mix of hyper-modern tech and traditional ways. This lady in a tiny repair shop used her old sewing machine to patch up our mosquito nets. Explaining what we needed was quite tough, and in the end, we even had to call Maggie, our guide, to translate and explain.
The toilet at our parking lot—easily the worst we had seen in China up to that point.
We pimped our pepper mill because it ground way too slowly. With a cordless drill attached, it worked like a charm.
We also visited a lovely temple and walked our prayer rounds around this shrine for good luck and a balanced life.
We boosted our luck a bit further by buying some candles…
… and writing down and hanging up our message of thanks alongside all the local ones.
With all those arms watching over us, nothing can go wrong!
