While on our Didi car ride from Chengdu East Railway Station to Citadines South Chengdu yesterday, we passed by a mammoth structure that the daughter observed was the Chengdu New Century Global Center, which, according to Wikipedia, is either the world’s largest or third largest building in the world by total floor area. Yep, Wiki seems contradictory on that point. Either way, the Center is just 2km or so from our place of stay, so we decided to check out the place on Day 18.
Our first impression of the place was ‘wow — it is indeed freakin’ huge’. The center houses a number of different facilities, including a large shopping mall, two hotels, an ice-skating rink, a museum, movie theaters, and even a water park. Not that we had the energy to explore all of that during our visit of about 4 hours: we checked out just the shopping mall side of things. The wife and kids concentrated on the apparel and cute stuff stores, while I was more interested in seeing tech toys that aren’t available in Singapore.
And of that, the Huawei store on the first floor was where I finally got to check out Huawei laptops, tablets, phones, and gadgets that I’ve only seen on YouTube videos. I wasn’t going to buy any of it, of course, since Huawei phones’ challenges with Android continue to be a thing.
Then there were the other stores, including Vivo, Sony, DJI, Honor, and Xiaomi. Of this bunch, Xiaomi was the other store which was carrying gadgets that — again — aren’t available in their brick-and-mortar stores back home. I would have been tempted to pick up something, e.g. the Redmi K Pad or the Mi Pad 7 Ultra, but then I would have had to deal with the potential Google Play Services issues, and also that the price of these things would have exceeded what I get under GST Relief. Funnily, the prices as displayed in the stores weren’t that much cheaper than just going with one of Shopee’s many parallel importers.
Still, it was fun to finally be able to touch and feel the latest tech gadgets that I have only up to this point seen on YouTube channels of Chinese tech toys. There’s a lot of F&B located at the B1 and fourth floors, and retail in between those floors, including many familiar brands.
Continued in the next post!