As you may remember, a few weeks back,
our friend Carlos came to visit from Chengdu. This past weekend, Lucia and I repaid the favor, heading west after work on Friday.
While we weren't there for very long, we managed to see a lot of the city and get a taste for the differences between Chongqing and Chengdu. For one, Chengdu has a significantly larger population of foreigners, which results in more bars and fewer stares. It also
caters to tourists more than Chongqing, perhaps because of the famous
Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding.
Here's a blog post someone else wrote that sums up the differences in character pretty well: Chongqing is chaos, Chengdu is chill. (In a google search for "Chongqing versus Chengdu" I turned up
this article as well, in case you're interested in starting a company and basing it in either Chengdu or Chongqing.)
 |
| The Chengdu train at Chongqing station. |
 |
| The crowd exiting at Chengdu. |
When we arrived, we met up with Carlos and hit a few popular foreigner nightlife spots with some people from our hostel - The Shamrock, Helen's, and Jellyfish. My camera takes terrible nighttime pictures so I didn't capture much.
