Let me just briefly state: I am back in the city I like least so far: ChengDu. I could lie and say I wanted to give it a second chance to convince me of its beauties. But as a matter of fact: I am here merely to meet with Payan, the German I had met before in Lhasa (see Future Plans in Lhasa (IV)). He returned here first and expected me to pass through as I had written him. When learning he is here I interrupted my original plan to move directly on to KunMing.
The idea now is to see two or three more things of ChengDu proper, then (probably starting Wednesday) do an overnight trip to supposingly nice Emei Shan, a 3000m mountain with a giant sitting Buddha statue and overwhelming sun rises. On the way to KunMing we likely stop by a small town where a colleague of him has invited us to.
TP_20070708_083056.jpg: Taiwan TaoYuan Chiang Kei-Shek International Airport, the airport serving Taipei, Terminal 1, departure hall, the very back of it, right in front of Starbucks. 😉 Yea…it really has a Starbucks, isn’t that great? Taipei has so many, seems they wanted to open one more and came up with that location. Otherwise you can see that the airport is already some time in use, to be honest. But highly efficient, I would even say the security checks a tiny bit superficial. My belt buckle always beeps in the securty checks, I’m used to getting double-checked with a metal detector manually. Annoying, but to the sake of security. Not so in TaoYuan: I went through the first security gate and it beeped. The security officer made some signs and I as usual got ready to be metal-checked. But what he actually wanted me to do was to run back and forth through another metal detector gate…and that one was apparently less sensitive, didn’t beep, and everything was fine… I also had the impression that the check of both the checked-in and the carry-on luggage was a triffle too quick.
Anyway…I got to my flights in time, the actual flights ran with a slight but not worrying delay. Transfer in Macau was without hassle, luggage arrived in ChengDu also fine. I had no accomodation reserved as I didn’t exactly know were I would end up. The hostel, in which Payam stays, the Mix Hostel, was full. And so I went back to my JinJiang Inn Hotel, which happens not to be far away from the Mix Hostel anyway. I was glad to hear that Payam was working at that time in a….Starbucks! And that’s where I met him.
After a long talk we were in search for food. That had been my problem during my first visit already. And it wasn’t much better. But ChengDu is trying to convince us…we at least found a fairly nice pedestrian street with reasonable shops and lots of westernized places like KFC or McD. But not the Japanese restaurants indicated in a map. We ended up with…please, don’t beat us, we didn’t want to…Pizza Hut.
On the restaurant issue ChengDu still needs to work. It has two more days…times running!
Today’s Lesson: Give ChengDu a second chance!
Categories: AsiaChengDu
Originally Created: 07/08/2007 05:25:45 PM
Last Edited: 07/08/2007