Chongqing, Chengdu, and Beijing 🇨🇳

Part 4: Exploring China with my Brothers (+ Harry)

Shanghai

Frazer, Taylor, and Harry arrived in Shanghai and spent the day exploring until I met them after work. It was a nice reunion after nearly 6 months of not seeing my family, who very kindly bought me some Meta Raybans which you can't get in China!
Our flight was pretty early so we got up at 5:30am to get to the airport for our flight to Chengdu.

Chengdu

Arriving in Chengdu, we checked in at the hostel and met this nice guy called Abs (later known as 黑龙, Black Dragon). Chengdu was a city overtaken by plants and looked like something out of Planet of the Apes.
We headed out for a fancy and famous Sichuan hotpot, the place we chose was next level, potentially the most Chinese building I have been inside since I came to China.
Abs mentioned a good street for bars and he was certainly right, a free bottle of Champagne and whiskey came our way after showing off our dance moves. [In China, seeing white people, a black person, AND all of them dancing in a club is quite rare; unremarkable anywhere else.]
The following day we ventured out to Leshan, to see the Giant Buddha! Our taxi driver was really testing my Chinese... and our patience. Every chance he had, he tried taking us to his friends restaurant, or upselling us some kind of tour. Eventually he got the idea.
We got to the ticket booth and ended up getting sold something completely different anyway!! Although, it turned out that those tickets were to see the smaller Buddha statues inside the mountains. Fortunately, they were a lot cooler than the actual Giant Buddha that we saw later on.
We had a really chilled evening in the hostel playing cards with the manager, his sister, Abs' date, and three random chinese people who joined later on. Off to Chongqing in the morning!

Chongqing

Arriving in Chongqing we had some noodles. Within 1 hour of arriving Frazer's throat was closing because they put peanuts in his noodles. So that wasn't too fun. He brute-forced not dying and we carried on with the day, including a few drinks at the top of our nice hotel, seeing a drone show on the tallest tower in Chongqing, and heading to 9th street where there were some really good bars - it was swarming. While these lot were checking out some clubs I got chatting to some locals and we ended up having noodles together at 7am on New year's Day which was really enjoyable.
As you can imagine we didn't wake up too soon after that, but I forced myself to get up and explore considering it was my last day in Chongqing as I had work the next day. I ambled around a scenic area called 'Xiahaoli', had some Chongqing tea, and relaxed for a while. We all met up and had a chilled evening eating barbecue in a carpark-turned-kitchen, before I said goodbye for the weekend.

Beijing

After my weekend classes, I made my way to Beijing where my Beijian friend met me at the station and kindly gave me a lift to the hostel.
The Great Wall awaited. At 5am we awoke and got ready to leave. It takes around 2 hours to get there from Beijing so we planned to arrive when it opened, 8am. At first it was quite underwhelming and smaller than we expected, but the view of the mountains was superb. As we trekked north across the wall, we began to realise the scale of it and the wall soon became the great again.
Unfortunately, we didnt see Tiananmen Square or the forbidden city as you had to book a day in advance. Instead, we got ruined and went clubbing. The club was probably the best in China because they had a hydraulic floor that forced everyone to dance, like it or not!
After a morning stroll around the lake, and a goodbye, it was time for me to head home for some lessons. My brothers and Harry were headed to the Phillipines to have an enjoyable and safe holiday...