Tea Time in Chengdu
Trip Start
Jun 03, 2006
1
18
131
Trip End
Ongoing
Chengdu,
China
Sunday, August 13, 2006
If Chengdu were in Guangdong it would probably be mocked and slated by the general populace, but people are either told to like it, or at least its many positive facets are emphasised and they either ignore or don't see the downsides
01. View from the Hostel
. And that, after all is a much nicer environment to be in. You can't help but like a city where people will take refuge from the afternoon heat and sit and chat for hours over a few pots of tea. Tables will suddenly join one another's conversation before reverting to their own. It's a genuinely social environment, and most notable is that the habit is shared by people of all ages. This isn't just the city's elders whiling away the hours, it's a generally accepted way of life. Nobody is rolling drunk as they might be in the UK if a sunny afternoon was spent in the local pub either. Beer is saved for drinking with food, because to be honest you need something to turn down the temperature a bit. The volume and strength of the chilli dishes is ferocious, and yet to my surprise I found I could still taste the flavours of my food. This isn't crude, chuck half a pot of chilli powder in the pot cooking. The chilli's actually enhancing the flavour. You can't feel your lips, your forehead's dripping sweat into your eyes, but the food tastes delicious. OK, on occasion I found myself sing Johnny Cash's Ring of Fire on the toilet the next morning, but it was a bearable price to pay for the feast on offer. The worst case of a chilli attack I heard about was an Irish guy staying in my hostel dorm who passed out the first time he tried Hot Pot, but he lived to tell the tale and eat it again
02. The road to the hostel
. Sichuan food is great - just be wared, be ready and order your very cold beer before you start eating!The chillis weren't the only thing to take their toll on me in Chengdu. It's a big city and I can vouch that it's not a place to be explored on foot, and certainly not wearing flip-flops. Fortunately, once you've figured out the buses, they're pretty good. The wonderful thing about teahouse culture is that you can sit for ages and recover. People always seem to have time to stop and talk to you too. I must have spent 4 or 5 hours in the gardens of Wenshu Temple, and to be honest I'm bored to death of China's Temples! There, however, I enjoyed the green contrast to the city outside, the wildlife and the rare site of a diversity of birds in a Chinese city, and not least my tea!
The other great thing about the tea houses was that when a heavy afternoon downpour came, there was somewhere to go hide! And once you were there, more fool anyone who thought that once the rain had stopped it was ok to go out. The dry heat suddenly turned to brutal humidity which seemed to erupt from the ground as the hot pavement evaporated the water. It felt like I was walking in a swimming pool from the waste down!
03. Time for tea
My abiding impression of Chengdu, food, tea and heat aside is that it's reinventing itself, but hasn't destroyed it's unique cultural habits and that a lifestyle is being preserved that isn't obsessed with money alone. For the sake of the city's inhabitants and anyone lucky enough to visit, I hope that this continues to be the case. I say hope, because there is construction work at every turn and it will be interesting to see what the huge People's Square looks like when it re-emerges from its current builder's yard state.
Everywhere there is large and small scale construction work going on. It's incredibly fast, but of very poor quality. I'm no master bricklayer, but I know for sure that I can do a better job than these guys are doing. This isn't a comment on Chengdu, but on sights I've seen all over China. I find myself asking, how long before this new China physicaly disintegrates? Whether it be poor quality walls, the ferocious climate, or because of the unskilled rural labour being used for increasingly complex construction. A few people - almost always with ties to the government - are making a fortune on the back of something that must physically collapse. The great unknown is how long before the cracks appear, what the consequences will be, how China's increasing ranks of private property owners and investors will react, and where the finger of blame will be pointed. The construction industry offers an analogy for the development of the country as a whole.
