Day 26 Chengdu, City centre

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Hi everyone!



We arrived into Chengdu train station at 5am this morning after very little sleep on the 3rd class hard sleeper from Xi'an. We took a tuk tuk from the station for 20 CYN (£2) to our hostel, luckily there were beds ready to climb straight into ? but not before having a well needed shower to get rid of the grime and extra Chinese pubes gained from unchanged sheets in the hard sleepers (yuck!!!!).



We woke about 8.30am and went out to get breakfast, we found local street breakfast that Neil loved (even tried to get dinner there this evening) he had a cold spicy beef sandwich but better than that. I had a brown sugar sandwich- I didn't finish most of it- too sweet even for me!





We came back to the hostel to sort loads of things like internal flights in Thailand and hostels, coach surfing requests, panda tour tomorrow etc. We then headed out to explore the city.

We firstly had a delicious lunch in a little local restaurant, very cheap, no English.... So tasty!!

I had the famous "dem dem Mier"** that Louisa and I lived on when we stayed at Chengdu university 5.5 years ago it's a non-spicy nutty noodle dish. Even Neil was impressed and he doesn't normally like nuts in food. Neil ate a spicy beef noodles dish - he loved it. In fact we even went back to this place for tea, Neil had dem dem Mier- the spicy version, with this amazing side dish of cabbage in vinegar, I had a small bowl of rice and stole bits off Neils plate as I was not that hungry.





Our exploration of the day included WenShu Temple, Mao's statue, a big shopping area including a fish and meat market, and people's park where were watched all the locals doing activities (see pictures) and had ourdoor tea in a tea room in the park. I had wulong tea and Neil had a amazing lemon tea (not a tea person normally) it was really quaint there. (They gave us glasses everyone else had teacups…think they saw Neil coming)





In the evening we decided to have a quiet one with a beer each and movie, as we had an early start for a visit to see the pandas in the morning.





Thats everything!! Love V&N X

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