cn 2026 summer

man, just like that i'm in my final year of college. not sure how many more of these trips i'll have time to go on...
maybe another one during winter break and one more before i start my job, but...

i've realized that these blog posts are both a great way to free up my icloud storage and also force myself to reflect on what actually happened in the photos a bit more. too many times i take a photo thinking i'll look back on it later only for that to just like, never happen. there's some new york photos i took over the summer that have been in my phone for months, and i just don't really know what to do with them

whatever, here we go again. you know the drill by now. here's the table of contents:

taizhou trip

just a couple days after i arrived in china, my cousin took me on a trip to taizhou with some of her friends

part of it was for fun, but apparently they also needed to go to this specific attraction called shenxianju (translates to godhome? sagehome? something like that) to make a dancing video for socials. the spot actually had a rule of 1 minute at the spot per tourist, so using up my time and another friend's they had just 4 minutes to get a good take. i think they wound up doing a pretty good job though:

i think it turned out pretty well!

there's an edited version on chinese tiktok somewhere, but i always like to use nonedited footage by myself. what it lacks in quality it makes up for in authenticity (holy copium).

these falls actually aren't in the area proper, but it's close by

HAPPY BIRTHDAY DANIEL! DID YOU THINK THIS DAY WOULD PASS QUIETLY?

i would've climbed up those stairs as a challenge, but to just go inside you needed to pay like 70 rmb for a ticket, so i refrained from doing so.

food-wise this trip mostly consisted of takeout slop, so i didn't get any pictures. on the way back, though, they had posted this sign over the urinals at a rest stop:

GENERATIONAL translation

usually the english is just some direct translation like "one small step for man, one large step for civilization" to remind you to not get pee everywhere. this one clears all the other localizations i've seen and it's not even close!

qingdao trip

after taizhou was the chengdu trip, and i already have a photodump for that. after chengdu, though, my mom took me with some extended family to qingdao.

the city proper

it was around a one hour flight, so we took off in the early morning and got to the hotel at around noon. first thing my mom decided to do was to take us to this nearby restaurant where they had all the food just right out on display for you to choose:

it looks like a lot, but honestly none of this really appealed to me

of course, it's not a chinese restaurant without the obligatory fish tanks!

i don't have any pictures, but in qingdao apparently the speciality dish is called 海肠捞饭, and we got that here. when i looked up what the english name is, i got this:

rice with WHAT???

regardless, the best description i can give you is white rice with this cooked sea worm type thing on top. it's like cut into little rings and you mix it with some broth into the rice beneath. at first i thought it looked nasty as hell, but honestly once you try it it's pretty good

when it got to low tide, i saw a buncha people around the revealed areas looking for sea critters

and this is the view from the hotel (>50th floor btw!!) at night with all the towers lit up. someone please tell me how to avoid this stupid reflection in the glass...

we went on a little sailboat excursion too, which i thankfully did not get seasick on. i got this photo, which is basically perfect all around except for a tiny issue. honestly, i'm not sure if you'll even be able to spot it:

my stupid ahh really just decided this one photo was enough for the roll. oh my god bruh...

for our final day in the actual city, we just messed around the interior of the city:

the streets in qingdao are very unique compared to other cities. apparently it used to be a german colony or something like that, so that's where most of the buildings and roads get their style from.

mom also took me to the chinese navy museum that was there HAHAHAHA

out the back of the museum you could see some battleships

man, who tried to shove an entire paper bag into one of these cigarette dispensers?

a toilet for tourists? like specifically for those from out of town?

ok maybe in retrospect they aren't laugh out loud funny, but i still find them amusing

laoshan

after our time in qingdao we caught a ~2 hour rideshare to "laoshan scenic area". not much to say about it except for that the scenery was nice:

i also got their supposedly special milk tea, which taste-wise wasn't all that special:

like the only thing even slightly special about this is the packaging no lie

our stay in this place was a night short of what it was supposed to be though. my mom got this seaside chinese airbnb equivalent that was supposed to be pretty good, but it wound up actually being below expectations. we wound up getting an 80% refund on our last night there and just spent it in the airport hotel instead.

that evening we went to a restaurant the served mule meat, which no one liked. i would've taken a picture but it just looked like beef but worse. after that we walked around this park with a massive lake around 20 minutes from the airport hotel:

there's a neat little pagoda in the park too

trip to zhujiajiao

just one final notable trip before we get into the random assortments. near the end of my stay in china my mom took me to 朱家角, one of china's "ancient" town that really just functions as a shopping mall for novelties.

on our way into the place i clipped this cool little machine catching trash in the river:

never saw these in the states before!

now i call it a glorified shopping mall, but even then the atmosphere is sublime:

there's a bunch of these river winding throughout the entire area that you can go out on with a boat

i love water scenes i cannot lie

snagged this sweet panorama sweeping across one of the main rivers

this is a view from that bridge on the far left side of the panorama

and here's the view from the opposite side of the bridge. lowk more of the same, but it is what it is

i know these stalls basically only sell to tourists, but damn! not even a chinese translation here, just pure english!

AAAWWWWWWW
(kitty lazing around in one of the stores)

jesus christ yeah there was also a stall selling fried bugs...

some weird milk tea that had fried? cooked? burnt? grains of rice within to serve as a topping. pretty mid, and definitely not worth the inflated price. oh well, they can't all be winners.

my mom got really excited when she saw these. i have no idea what these are. to me they may as well be more grubs or whatever.

s-tier wooden hornet figurine that i got for around 70 rmb. it was originally 100, but my mom wanted to haggle so...
the head and the needle are also magnetically attached and so can be taken off. i have no idea why they designed her like that.

funny photos

a classic anime whiteboard they have in some merch stores

and another outside a lawson-specific anime store. lawson does a metric frick-ton of collabs with acgn franchises, so honestly not that surprising

a wuwa car wrap out in the wild lol

and an arknights one i saw walking around jing an temple

i was also browsing a bookstore on fuzhou road and came upon some absolute math GEMS:

all of these textbooks would probably be over $100 a pop if they were in the states. however, due to reasons i cannot comprehend, they are only around 70 rmb here.

HOLY GOAT

HOLY EVEN MORE GOAT

and there's just two more genuinely miscellaneous photos that i just gotta show:

son son son sahur 💔 😭

they had this plant vending machine in the subway station at xujiahui. honestly pretty goated idea assuming your target demographic is husbands who forgot that it was their wedding anniversary LOL

food!

this time i was staying with my maternal grandpa, but a bunch of times i would go out with my paternal grandparents to get lunch. they always had some fire restaurant picks, but when we actually went out they would always overorder 💀

one of these times was literally the very next day after i landed in china. i suggested peking duck, and they took me to a restaurant called "moose" even though its logo was most certainly that of a deer:

yangzhou fried rice

an overpriced, tiny serving of red-cooked pork i believe

the peking duck that we got

the same duck, sliced up along with all the other things that go with it

the bibimbap is why i wanted to go there

but they also wanted to order some other dishes which were also hella good

and then my paternal grandpa suggested hong kong cuisine which was fire as well:

some ceylon milk tea + a little bear made out of frozen milk tea. the idea is you pour the tea inside the cup and watch the bear melt. it honestly broke my heart watching it melt away, but at least its soul lives on in this photo

some absolutely fire duck meat

and some egg/shrimp/mysterious veggie stir fry

i'm pretty sure this is chow mein, chow fun, some variant of that

fish slices

goose meat, cooked similarly to the duck in the hk restaurant

an absolutely MASSIVE pot of fried rice (this picture does not do it justice). by the time this rice came we were so full we could only eat like 20% of it. my grandparents took the rest home as takeout LOL

other times my mom's side would take me out to places to eat. while my paternal grandparents mostly aimed for higher-end, sit-down type restaurants, my mom's side was a little more comfortable with slightly faster, food court style stuff. both have their pros, but a philistine like me can't help but gravitate towards the latter.

some restaurants in china operate on a sort of self-serve model where you pick what you want from an array of food and just pay at the end. there was also a massive pot of rice and soup in the middle that was free for all. this style gives off communist vibes, i'm not sure why.

when i was out with my mom in the "developing" part of shanghai, there was this boba/gelato store with what i thought was a really well-designed menu. in the age of ai slop, peak design like this is a breath of fresh air

we wound up sharing a mix of thai tea and what i'm pretty sure is lemon flavored gelato

this chain store called 肉肉大米 (literally "meat meat big rice") is heaven on earth- i went here like three separate times. the concept is pretty simple too, they just give you a loose burger patty, some rice, and an egg to mix in

not all restaurants i went to with my mom's side were food-court style eats. like one night we went out for a comedy show and we got some real shanghai classics

i was walking around a mall with my cousin when we saw that a donut store was running a buy one get one, presumably to empty out their stock before they closed for the day and had to throw everything out. we got a mint chocolate and tiramisu flavored one.

some popcorn chicken and rice with pork on top i got w/ my cousin. she didn't order anything though cuz she said she had dinner plans w/ a friend of hers

pizza hut i got w grandpa. i never got why it is that american fast food brands taste the worst in america, where they literally ORIGINATED FROM???

out of all these outings though, the worst (best) was probably the time my cousin (NOT ME) suggested that we go to a maid cafe

her doing a cutesie little drawing on top of my omurice

ts was like 200 rmb btw 💔 more than half of that was probably for the experience. before this a girl also danced to the needy streamer song for us that i would've recorded if they didn't ban it

my cousin also asked if i wanted to go out to a nightclub with some other friends from her alma mater. i thought it would be something to cross off my bucket list, so i decided to go...

actually i'm pretty sure one of these drinks in the pics are non-alcoholic, but i have no idea which one it is
this was when i still had a bit of jet lag, so i barely had a couple sips of the middle one before starting to feel woozy

the friend that she took me to the club with was also telling me some batcrap insane stuff. i told him i was going to chengdu with conserve and he just started yapping about there were a bajillion gay bars there :OMEGALUL:
he told me the fully bearded ones with vests are the most fruity too, like this was valuable information i was somehow going to utilize on the trip

on my birthday, i met up with my goat conservemomenta who also happened to be in china at the time and we got sushi. despite my pleas, he insisted on paying for the whole thing like a buffoon.

foie gras on top of some rice

variety seafood sushi

yeah i cannot remember for the life of me what other flavors we got

but awww, conserve's got our dms pulled up on his phone!

after sushi we got auntea jennie (my new favorite boba shop, tied with chagee though)

this time i really tried to go out and get noodle soup as much as possible. there was this place in ny chinatown that got me hooked on it, so i wanted to get as much of it as possible while conversion rates were still on my side.

lanzhou noodles w/ paternal grandparents (the type the new york place was serving)

chongqin beef noodle soup w/ mom (peak)

i forgor which region this noodle soup is supposed to be, but it was also pretty good (w/ paternal grandpa)

i wasn't always out eating with family members obviously. many times i would just see something in a food court and be like, "sure, why not?"

these bagels i got at the "NY bAgElOUs MUSEuM" are genuinely the worst bagels ever. this photo is lying to you. they didn't even toast the bread, and the lox is mediocre at best. my standards were low but HOLY HELL

there was a quarter at my school during which they gave some free meal swipes and i would use them all on the campus yoshinoya. just wanted to experience it in cn again where it's a bit cheaper, even if the menu is hella different

this zaku zaku ice cream is supposed to be creamier than the others because it's like hokkaido milk or smth. getting it here is lowk the same price as getting equivalent ice cream in the us tho...

i was mobile ordering from a new drink place that popped up and MY BROTHER IN CHRIST DOES THAT SAY 144 CUPS AHEAD OF ME???

the actual drink (some kinda strawberry yogurt slush) was half melted by the time i got it...
still not bad, though, certainly not worth the wait

some wonton soup at one of my usual breakfast places

i also went to get some scallion pancakes to bring home, but apparently they were out at the moment, so i got to clip them making 100% fresh ones! here's the dough being rolled out

and them being put in the deep fryer (i got like 3 in total i think)

pretty scenery

liyang

idk all the pics i took here were just scenery so i didn't feel the need to make my trip out to liyang a whole section like the others. all of these pics are of a big bamboo forest on a mountain that my mom and i hiked up.

a video panorama of the peak. apparently you can see bits of zhejiang, jiangsu, and anhui province. we didn't walk 100% of the way up here- around halfway elevation-wise there's a cable car that automates around 40%(?) of the elevation gain. you might think that's cheating, but my mom and i were there for scenery, not exercise.

china always likes to spice these scenic areas up with manmade attractions, but i didn't find any of them interesting enough to clip. as such, all of these photos are just of rolling green.

within the city

my grandpa and mom would sometimes randomly take me to various places in the city to sightsee. i swear every time i come back there's always something that i haven't seen...

like one day my mom took me to a park near the jing an template subway station that i had no clue existed:

random ahh disco balls in the lake lol

butterfly!!!

and another time she took me to a country club pool that was renovated into some restaurants:

despite it still being maintained and such, swimming is actually banned here HAHAHAHAHAHAHA

this is what it looks like from the other end
you can vaguely see some people sitting around the pool eating lunch

going out with my grandpa is always the best though. we hit up a part of shanghai that had some pretty old buildings and he regaled me with some tales of what the buildings used to be and what they were like when he was a kid. honestly it still amazes me that my grandparents basically just as old if not older than the PRC.

maybe this building is where he learned to swim? i'm actually not sure- for some reaosn i don't have any notes about this place 💀💀💀

this was taken on a bridge over the suzhou river, one of the main tributaries to the huangpu. you can see what might be one of the first post offices in shanghai in the distance (the building w/ the clock tower). there's also a bellagio hotel on the far right of the pic. according to my grandpa it used to be shanghai's first hospital!

this is the view from the other side of the bridge. apparently the suzhou river used to be clean and green before rapid industrial development turned it basically black. the government then stepped in (probably before i was born) to stop cargo ships from coming through and the river reverted back to the green you see in this photo
also the red and white building i circled in red used to be the ussr embassy. now it's converted to working for russia (obviously)

this used to be a movie theater! i actually don't remember if he said it was still operating haha. but back then ticket prices were 5 fen (rmb equivalent of cents)!

shanghai's "developing" area

my last night in china my mom took me to the far end of the bund. i call it "developing" in air quotes because developers are trying to turn this area into a place as packed as the actual bund by building gazillion of malls and office buildings. i'm not sure if it's working as well as they expected it to, but the buildings sure are nice.

a pano of the nighttime skyline

another pic of some buildings across the huangpu

W design here- there's an elevated pedestrian bridge, and on the side they put in climbing stones for people to mess around on.
(dw too much about safety, you can see there's mats at the bottom to land on)

a close-up photo (or as close as i could get) of the lupu bridge

i took way too many photos at this gallery

so a week or two into my china trip my maternal grandpa took me to this glass-centric art exhibition where most of the stuff was, well, made out of glass. (this was actually the same trip on which i took the photos of "old" shanghai.) i didn't wanna feel like the tickets went to waste, so i spammed pictures on anything i thought was even remotely interesting.

now i don't want to just outright delete them, so i'll just post them all here rapid-fire:

ok the last one actually wasn't from the glass exhibition- it's from another gallery that was around a couple blocks away, but i actually found it the most interesting. not so much as the art itself (trying to discuss smth about how trans people have to defend themselves), but about the fact that there's trans art in CHINA. how in the world did that display get past the censors? it's not even like a "oh, they don't know those colors are the trans flag", like, the description on the wall besides this explicitly discussed trans violence!

eh, many things in this world are beyond my understanding. there's just one more photo i have, and it's of some coffee/dessert my grandpa and i got at the cafe at the end of the gallery:

near the bottom is a very cute diy print that they let you make by applying one stamp of each color onto a blank piece of paper. i actually made two, one for my grandpa and one for me to take home.

phew, that's all my photos. this actually might've been the longest photodump so far- might be because of the bajillion trips i went on this time.

once again, if you do find yourself at the end here, thanks so much for taking the time to look at my china pics! it really does mean a lot to me :)