For our week off, we thought we'd take advantage of the break to visit somewhere pretty far from where we live. Thus we decided to visit Chengdu, in the Sichuan province - pretty much opposite of where we are. We ended up having to book a 37 hour train ride to get there. It was a pretty awesome city though, so it was worth the journey there.

A little sleepy, but pretty happy to be on the train



It was super beautiful outside, but every time Chad tried to look or get a picture we went through a tunnel.
See! Super beautiful, mountains and rivers and whatnot
This is me being pretty amped to be outside the train. We aren't in Chengdu, but it was a long stop so you could go outside and stretch. It was also nice to not breathe in stale train air and escape the smokers a bit (yeah, people smoked on the train). 
Just laying back, sippin' on some tea. On our way to Chengdu, we got what are called "hard sleepers" it's a super thin pad on a slightly wider than normal bench, but it's long enough (just barely) to lay back and relax.

We played some pretty epic rounds of war on the train (which if you follow me in Instagram you should remember this) and I won this awesome war. I got 2 Aces, a King and a Queen from Chad - don't worry though, he won a pair of three's off the next one. Karma and all that
After arriving in Chengdu, we checked into our hostel and showered 37 hours of train off ourselves and then decided our first stop would be the Apple Store since the lock button on my phone is not working. That was a bust because for some reason American iPhones are different from Chinese iPhones. The Apple store was located in a pretty swanky mall so we decided to explore it a bit and what did we find? A MEXICAN RESTAURANT!

That served Vanilla Coke! In a mason jar.

Here's our meal! Chad got the burritos and I got a taco salad because there is a serious lack of salad in China

We also decided to try the fried ice cream. GOOD choice, as you'll see below there is some seriously awesome thick caramel that accompanied it and I might have used my finger to get every last sweet bit of it.


Another cool site at this mall was a 2 (TWO!) story escalator. Don't worry, after we took this sweet picture we rode it. 


After this mall we decided the next logical step would be to walk to another mall and check it out. On the way we saw these adorable puppies!

Cute puppies!!
I almost grabbed one and started running!
The next mall we ended up at was pretty cool. It was like 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica, tons of people around, tons of stores and quite the party. 

This building is pretty cool because it is in the middle of the mall with all these huge stores and it's a random alley way from like 1914

If you look closely you'll see Chad, reading the plaque. Surprise.

Bumblebee was also at the mall, thanks to Burger King
 We maybe got incredibly lost on our way home, but in doing so we found this really cool area along one of the many rivers of Chengdu so we took a ton of pictures that I probably won't caption much.




 





It's pretty neat how much of the city is lit up and it makes it feel really safe, which I love, but having been in a few Chinese cities now I really find it had to believe the U.S. wastes more power than any other country. Anyway, in front of our hostel was a YUMMY Thai restaurant so we had dinner there. We got Pad Thai and a seafood curry and rice dish. Both were sooo delicious that I secretly wanted to go back for every meal, but we didn't.