the rock reads "sacred ground of the three kingdoms"...i think? my chinese highk sucks so
this summer, both conservemomenta and i had some time to go back to china after our summer internships. there's a lot to say about the quarter system, but school starting in late september is certainly one of its benefits.
we'd already met up in shanghai (both our hometowns) plenty of times, so this time we decided to take a trip down to chengdu and just mess around there for a bit.
unlike with anime expo, a lot of these photos don't warrant, like, an explanation or caption of sorts. a good portion of them is just scenery that i thought was photoworthy, so i'm not sure how much writing will actually be in this blog post.
eh, i'll just put them here and see where the winds take me.
our flight was around 3 hours and we took off around 9, so we had the better part of an afternoon to mess around the city.
when i told my my paternal grandfather i was going to go to chengdu, he really shilled this one place called 武侯祠 (wu hou ci), which is a shrine dedicated to zhu geliang. for those of you around the world (as mulaney would say), zhu was a really renowned strategist during the three kingdom period right after the han dynasty. this is despite the fact that the kingdom he worked for, the shu, literally lost. imagine losing a war and still getting glazed to hell and back.
we dropped off our stuff at the hotel and then called an uber there. there was a rock at the entrance gate, and i got conserve to take this photo of me:
we then bought tickets and went in. even though china has an official student id of sorts that's issued to college kids nationwide, i still managed to get a student discount of 50% by showing them my ucla bruincard. conserve, the absolute buffoon that he is, forgot to bring his school's student id, so he had to pay full price.
these two pictures were taken basically right as we stepped into the shrine:
and then a couple rooms in we saw some statues:
i'm not sure why i didn't get a pic of zhang fei, liu bei's other day one. i coulda sworn i took a pic of him too...
whatever. walking past all these statues, we finally got to the big Z himself:
oh yeah- as i was reading the descriptions next to all of these statues, i noticed that nearly all of these statues were sculpted in the qing dynasty, the last of china's imperial dynasties. so yeah, idt any of the "artifacts" on display here are actually from the three kingdoms. i mean it makes sense, given that the period was in like the 200s, but still.
there was also another more independent shrine after the main set of rooms:
after that most of my pictures are just of scenery. i'll just spam them all here:
and that was basically all of 武侯祠. pretty good park, pretty mid historical museum.
besides it was also an "ancient town", which these days in china means a glorified shopping mall with vendors shilling their stuff left and right.
i didn't go in expecting to buy anything, but then i came across this stall:
this booth had anime art that was done using paper-cutting, a classic chinese art form. they had tons of merch, including, unfortunately, arknights, which meant i had to buy a couple. the frames in front were 55 rmb a piece, so thankfully i didn't bleed too much money.
the guy making all of these even took commissions where you could give him a photo and he'd recreate it with paper. conserve decided to get a 500 rmb one using a family group photo. it sounds expensive at first, but then you realize that in the us art commissions can easily go above 100 usd, so really conserve was the one ripping off the artist here with his us purchasing power.
anime art aside, there wasn't anything else notable about this "ancient town".
for dinner i wanted to try hot pot. nearly everyone on both sides of my family doesn't really like hot pot, but according to conserve chengdu is known for it and i wanted to give it another shot, so conserve and i went to this place called 吼堂老火锅 (houtang old hot pot is the best tl i can think of rn for the name):
the best i can say is that they met expectations. my opinion on hot pot remains slightly negative, since i never really found the whole workflow of dipping meat into the soup for a couple seconds particularly rewarding or fun. i'll stick with my rice and family-style dishes, thank you very much.
they also had this guy performing face changing for some reason???
and yeah, that was basically it for the first day. i went to a nearby mall for a short walk, but didn't find anything notable. before i end this section, though, just wanted to share our hotel view really quick:
today we actually went to two places!
yeah i think this was just were a famous poet, du fu, stayed for a bit. pretty big chance the current buildings were constructed in the last century like with 武侯祠, but i personally was here more for the ambiance and greenery than the actual historic value of the place.
besides the greenery, there were also some dope statues. if i were more chinese i could probably tell yall who they actually are
besides the scenery, there were some other things that i thought were photoworthy in the moment:
and last but not least:
i didn't get a picture of our actual lunch, but for some reason i took pictures of the things i got for dessert after:
in the afternoon we went to du jiang yan, this massive irrigation project that was completed like 2k years ago. apparently there was a river used to spill out without any rhyme or reason into the area below, so the government did a ton of digging to direct it into some regulated rivers for irrigation and flood prevention purposes
the thing is, to my naked eye it just looked like your everyday river:
oh yeah there was a temple in the middle of the area where you could pay 20 rmb to hang a wish on the wall. a surprising amount of them were written in english, too. after some banter conserve and i decided to both pay up and write our own wishes:
that night i had an interview so we didn't have time to properly eat out. we just hit up a nearby kfc and got some chicken nuggies haha
and just like that we were on our last true day of the trip! (day 4 we just bummed in the hotel for a couple hours before going off to the airport so nothing worth reporting there)
this day conserve wanted to go to the chengdu panda research base. i'd been there before last year and thus wanted to go to someplace farther, but the rideshare price was a bit too much for both of us.
"screw it," i thought. "what are the odds i actually remember the stuff i saw from last time?"
and i was right :OMEGALUL:
unfortunately, today was so hot they brought all of the pandas to the indoor exhibits. so like the better part of all the park enclosures were just straight up empty
i still got some panda clips though:
we also spotted some red pandas. the thing is they were always hidden in like the very center of the exhibit, so the quality of my clips here are kinda buns:
i thought that this zoo only had giant pandas/red pandas, but conserve looked at the map and found that they had a monkey exhibition too! the walk over there was insanely long and conserve was dying from the heat by the time we got there, but it was worth it:
and here's pics of our last dinner in chengdu:
and that's it for our trip to chengdu! tysm for taking the time to read through the post <3