Chengdu: Day 1 (11/11/19)
After staying up to like 4am last night I slept till around noon and then spent the day working on my grad school essays and making plans for my time in China. It was pretty dead up on the open-air 3rd floor where my room was so I planted myself at a table and just got grinding. A few times I tried to venture onto the internet via a VPN, but even though it specifically advertised being available in China it absolutely was not. So I was pretty much stuck offline except for maps I had already downloaded and official park/city websites. That made it way more difficult to plan any sort of detail ahead of time, but at least I could use AirBnB on my phone with data so I could find places to stay.
I snacked my way through most of the day and when dinner time came I was famished. Of course I had no idea what was around so I just took a walk around the area and stumbled upon a restaurant - the front part open-air like yesterday. They didn’t have an English menu but fortunately Google translate could make out the basics and I ordered some sort of noodle dish. It turned out to be a light broth with a pile of spiced meat, noodles, and green onions. Absolutely phenomenal, I would have eaten another bowl in a heartbeat if I had any room left. If I didn’t have a policy about trying to eat somewhere different every day I probably would have come back here for dinner every night!
My dinner was made even better by a visitor! A young man spotted me from outside and joined me at my table. He ordered food and then broke out a text translator app on his own phone and started up a text conversation while we ate. He was a university student living nearby and was really interested in my travels, which I share many stories from. I asked what living in Chengdu was like and he passionately declared it the best city hes even been in and that he never wants to leave. Except to travel, which is one of his dreams. I encouraged him to do so, but he expressed he would probably never get to do a backpacking trip like mine since in China you have to have a specific plan to travel abroad and can’t just wing it. That was something I hadn’t considered so far, that the ability to travel without telling your plans to someone was a privilege I had been exercising. We continued talking for a while after our food was gone and then parted ways.
I wandered around a little more and sucked into a convenience/grocery store a few blocks from the hostel to browse. The snacks were all very different than anywhere else I had been so I snagged a variety before heading back to my room. I continued working and pretty much finalized my plans for China while plowing through a box of match-flavor cookies. I would have fallen asleep at a reasonable time if not for the fact that I had slept till noon and that one of my roommates was a late-night gamer that shouted quite a bit. I was really surprised by that but nobody else in the room said anything so I took it as a cultural difference on what acceptable roommate behavior is and went to take a long shower and thoroughly brush my hair. He eventually left at like 1am and I fell asleep with plans to check out downtown tomorrow.
