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. However, 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 on this already long trip. So, we decided to keep it super chill and looked for a mall nearer to where we’d been staying to just take it super easy on this last full day.
We found one such place: Chengdu Intime City Shopping Center that’s just a kilometer away from Citadines South Chengdu. We toyed over the idea of whether to walk there 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 they’ve seen better days. Like the earlier two days though, the tech shops — including those of Huawei, 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 have replaced my aging iPad Mini 6, but offer the exact specifications that would tick every box: the Redmi K Pad lacked an OLED screen; otherwise it was perfect. Whereas the Huawei MatePad Mini — a stunningly built and lovely tablet — is perfect in every way, except 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 it. 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!
