Our First Day in China

We arrived in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province in the early afternoon and were met by our Swedish guide Anders, our local guide Rebecca and our trusty driver Mr Shi who never said a word the whole trip.

Why all the fuss?!  Well it turned out that I hadn't done a whole of research when I booked this trip and we ended up booking throughout a very highly regarded, but also extremely high end tour company! In hindsight I learned that I could have gone through A&K and just had the one guide and probably saved a little money. But one big benefit of this trip was that we had complete flexibility and could easily change our plans on the fly (which we often did). I certainly didn't regret how it all worked out - although it often felt that we had quite the little entourage going everywhere!

Anders was fluent in Chinese and had a Masters in Chinese history, lived in Shanghai and would stay with us throughout our trip.  He was our lead guide and any little comment or mild preference we expressed, he rushed to take care of.  He was also a very interesting conversationalist on a pretty wide variety of topics. Rebecca's English was good but not nuanced, and she would just be with us for the two days in Chengdu, her native city.  And Mr Shi capably (if rather insanely!) drove the little bus we took everywhere, liberally applying his horn to get us there quickly.

And so we arrived at the Shangri-la in Chengdu, which closely resembled the various other Shangri-las I had been to (Bangkok, Singapore, HK).  Something wasn't quite right with our rooms and Anders started off demonstrating his advocacy for us by arguing at length with the front desk.  It was all quite amusing!

We finally checked in to a gorgeous pair of rooms on the 27th floor with a view of the river and the city.  And promptly headed down to the Lobby Lounge where every other Shangri-la Hotel serves afternoon tea.  Alas, not in Chengdu!  My limited Mandarin was shown to be completely inadequate when it took me multiple tries to get a Diet Coke.  And we ended up ordering off the room service menu that they brought us.  It was all very good, just not quite what we expected.

We later met up with our little entourage to head out to a little renovated pair of walking streets for a stroll before a nice Sichuan dinner that we would have been completely unable to order without Anders. Rebecca hung out with us and told us about Chengdu history, culture and customs, but left before dinner.

I especially liked this beautiful Starbucks we saw.  Starbucks has the quite the presence in China!

It was stiflingly hot even in the evening, at least 90 F and amazingly high humidity.  It might possibly have been more humid than Bangkok!  After buying Mei a hand-painted panda fan to start our shopping for the trip, we headed back to the hotel and called it a day.