more about Chengdu
Okay, breakfast at guesthouse before train (oatmeal with watermelon and unidentifiable local fruit, salty duck egg (urk—it would be better not salty), fresh OJ)—so there’s time to fill in some on what Chengdu is like. Chengdu is, as you could have guessed, a huge city. It’s organic and dense with shops and alleys and human dramas and whatnot but on the large scale it feels centrally planned: three ring roads, the largest maybe 10 km across, with a plaza and giant statue of Mao at the very center. The Chengduians thought it was weird and funny that I was photographing Mao. But then they find pretty much everything I do or say weird and funny. I was expecting it to take ten minutes and a lot of prayer just to cross the street, but the streets are huge—the major roads are about 12 lanes across, including bike/motorbike lanes and sometimes islands where buses stop—and there’s lots of open space—not enough cars (yet!) to fill the roads. Traffic moves at a fast bike pace, not a car pace, and so it isn’t that hard to play Frogger and get where you’re going. My main memory of Chengdu traffic will be, I think, huge empty intersections the size of skating rinks with conglomerations of scooters and pushcarts waiting one third of the way into the road, and then the light changing and all the conglomerations crossing through each other at incompatible angles with no one hurrying and no one swerving. There aren’t many white people here. A few show up at the temples, and in two days I saw maybe three strays like myself just out and about, but that’s it. Downtown, at least, the food that it’s easiest to find is Western fast food—KFC, McDonalds, local clones—followed by street vendors and unnamed shops, that open up at mealtime. Restaurants with menus take some searching. Most of the street food scares me (meat on skewers, things to dip it in) but last night I stepped up to a young guy who had a pile of fried triangles and a pile of shredded vegetable matter. He took a handful of shreds, tossed in a bunch of vinegar, paused over it with the heaping tablespoon of chili flakes with a questioning look (I made a “tiny!” gesture and he put in half a tablespoon), then some ground szechuan pepper (the kind that numb you instead of setting you on fire), then a white powder, then another white powder, then another white powder, mixed it all up, slit open two fried triangles and stuffed it inside. I think it cost 14 cents. I got a bubble coffee from the woman at the next pushcart and ate as is the custom, standing around the person you bought the food from as if he’s your bartender. A bunch of trendy college kids—dressed the same as in Seoul or Tokyo—came up, tried to engage me in conversation, and found the whole thing weird and funny. When the city buses are packed at rush hour (and packed means no one can move, and the only concession to safety is that the last passenger in crams in one step up from the doors instead of leaning against them), both front and back doors open, and people who get in in the back pass their bus passes up to the front to get scanned by the driver. So huge handfuls of plastic passes come hand to hand forward, then a while later hand to hand back, disappearing into the crowd and somehow getting back to their owners. It pours rain every afternoon—it’s a monsoon climate, with ginkos and some palm trees—but no one seems to own a raincoat. They carry umbrellas. They have raincoats for human-scooter cyborgs but not humans by themselves. Anything I’m forgetting to tell you? Especially now that I can’t read my own blog, it’s hard to be thorough or coherent.
