Our initial already sedate plan for Day 20 was to return to Chengdu city center and visit Kuanzhai Alley, A historic district featuring renovated Qing Dynasty-era buildings. Howeever, one look at the weather outside mid-morning today made us think again: the weather was drab and looked chilly – a fact that made me uncertain if I wanted to stay outdoors anymore in this already long trip. So, we decided to keep it super chill and looked for a mall nearer to where we’d been staying and to just take it super easy on this last full day.
We found one such: Chengdu Intime City Shopping Center that’s just a kilometer away from Citadies South Chengdu. We toyed over the idea of whether to walk it or just get a Didi ride, and we opted for the latter, again on account of the weather! This large mall was a pleasant surprise: there were few visitors this Christmas eve, the mall had the usual suite of retail, apparel, tech and dining establishments, and it was a modern mall, even if the exteriors look like it’s seen better days. Like the earlier two days though, the tech shops – including that of Huawe, Vivo, Oppo, and Mi – were all carrying the same range of items we’d seen at Chengdu New Century Global Center, and also along Chunxi Road – so nothing was actually new at this point. Though I seriously considered whether I should pick up the Redmi K Pad or Huawei MatePad Mini, neither of which are available in Singapore outside parallel imports. Both are small form factor tablets and would had replaced my aging iPad Mini 6, but offer the eaxct specification that would tick every box: the Redmi K Pad lacked an OLD screen; otherwise it was perfect. Whereas the Huawei Matepad Mini – a stunningly built and lovely tablet – is perfect in everyway, excepting that it doesn’t run Android natively. Gaaah. Why can’t we have a small form factor tablet + OLED display + runs on Android.
I don’t think there’s anything particularly special in this place though, so I don’t recommend visitors to Chengdu go out of their way just to visit this place. That aside; we enjoyed the five hours we hung around Intime City today; it was unhurried, and very peaceful without crowds. A perfect way to wind down our long 21 day trip to Yunnan and Western Sichuan!
