Travelling (Erin)

Shanghai

After a 2-and-a-half-hour flight from Tianjin, we landed in our first stop of the China trip; Shanghai. We arrived in the evening to see the cities’ stunning skyline lit up. The first night we went straight to Nanjing Road (Shanghai’s Culture Street) for lots of Markets, cute shops, and xiaolongbao (dumplings). I even tried Sugar Cane Juice (10/10) would recommend.

Highlights of the trip:

• Eating at a famous jazz bar in Shanghai with a band playing all the way from Brazil
• Yuyuan gardens lit up with many lanterns decorated for new years
• Meeting a calligrapher who signed my Chinese name and promised to find me a Chinese boyfriend.
• Temple hopping around the cities many Buddhist temples.

Shanghai had such a cool vibe and great nightlife. It's a very international city so we were able to meet people from all over the world.

Zhangjiajie

DAY 1:  To get to our next stop we took a very old-fashioned sleeper train for 10 Hours and arrived the next morning in Zhangjiajie.  The first thing we did was find a little family-owned restaurant near our hostel with the sweetest staff and the best dumplings, that would become a staple to our Zhangjiajie trip. Though running on little sleep, we couldn't waste any time and went straight to braving Tianmen Mountain (heaven's gate mountain). A cable car took us up that was so steep it took us through the clouds to the most gorgeous views. When we reached the top, we took a trek along the snow-covered mountain, taking pitstops at temples along the way.

DAY 2:  Zhangjiajie National Park is the landscape that inspired the movie avatar, and we could see the resemblance. The park was massive with wild monkeys at every corner trying to steal your food. Even the food stalls around the park had to have makeshift slingshots to ward them off. ( I had a packet of crisps snatched from me and Louanna was jumped on and had her bag unzipped and raided for food) The ‘don't mess with wild monkeys’ signposts were no joke.

DAY 3:  We walked (with our knees shaking) the glass bridge at the Zhangjiajie Grand Canyon seeing the amazing views of the canyon bellow us, then took a zipline all the way across the canyon to the other side.

Zhangjiajie was the reconnection with nature we needed after living in mega cities for so long.

Chongqing

Before going to Chongqing, I'd heard crazy things about it; Like how it's the size of Austria (wild to think about coming from Scotland with a population of only 5 Ish million.) and that the city is famous for having trains go through apartment buildings, having the deepest metro system in the world, over 40 floor skyscrapers, and holding the Guinness world record for world's largest hotpot. It is known as the ‘cyber punk’ city as it's so advanced and modern.

Highlights of the trip:

• Liziba station- we waited for the train to come to see it shoot through the apartment building
• Finding a rooftop restaurant with views of the skyline and watching an unexpected drone show there
• KTV- having a night at karaoke
• Building our spice tolerances at the famous Chongqing spicy hotpot.
• Taking a cable car across the river.

Chongqing was definitely the most impressive city we went to, just the sheer size of it made us feel so small and just in awe of every corner of the city. I would describe it as the ‘New York’ of China, it even had the yellow taxis and a ‘times square.’

Chengdu

Panda City! Home to Chinas iconic pandas. In Chengdu, you see Panda themes around every corner (even the bins were panda themed).

Here, we stayed at a hostel with a cool and social vibe, we were able to meet friends from all over China and the rest of the world and enjoyed live music and games every night.

We were in Chengdu at the same time as Hannah, Latifa and Bronwyn, so we all met up and went to the Panda research Base together. We saw hundreds of Pandas there (Hua- Hua and the red pandas were Highlights) and there was even a panda there with my Chinese name 艾琳  (Eileen)- my twin.

Chengdu is also famous for its cute little tea shops and Sichuan operas, where we went to see the face changing mask show and kung fu tea performances. Theres a humungous peoples park where we found an in-person version of tinder; people print out a dating profile and pin it up inside the park, so you can have a stroll and read all the dating profiles. Chengdu was such a unique city!

Leshan

From Chengdu, I decided to take a solo day trip to a city nearby- Leshan, which is famous for its giant Buddha statue.

The entire park was beside a river and the trail was entirely uphill passing so many temples and different statues, carvings and depictions of buddha. There was so much to explore there before even reaching the giant buddha statue. While I was exploring the pharmacist buddha statue cave, i met a friendly monk who offered to take photos for me.

I spent the whole day there and came back to Chengdu very late and very tired after having banged out about 30,000 steps. Leshan was such a cool place, definitely worth the trip.

Xi'an

Highlights of the trip:

• Getting to see the 2,200-year-old terracotta army in person.
• Cycling around the city taking in all the sights.
• Trying Biang Biang Noodles- very thick noodles with very complex Chinese character. ‘𰻞’
• Walking along the ancient wall lit up with lanterns for the new year.
• Haggling for lower prices on souvenirs in the Muslim quarter markets.

As the Ancient capital of China, it was amazing to see the massive amounts of culture there, such an interesting city.

Harbin

Me and Arwen spontaneously decided to take the bullet train to Harbin on Chinese New Years Day as we decided we couldn't miss the two-month long Snow and Ice festival there. When we arrived, we stepped out into –18-degree weather, even though we came prepped with our thickest clothes, we still felt it.

Highlights of the trip:

• The snow and ice festival was amazing, there were ice sculptures there of anything you can think of, including famous landmarks like the temple of heaven, there were igloos, giant ice sculptures of iced tea and a giant ice Ferris wheel. The entire park lit up at night and was even more gorgeous.
• At night they held an ‘Ice Rave’ in the park which is exactly what it sounds like and was the best thing ever.
• The next day we went exploring around the city which has a lot of Russian architecture due to its proximity. We can count the number of times we were mistaken for being Russian.
• We then went to the Siberian tiger park where we took a bus tour around the park and saw the tigers get up close to the vehicle, so cool!