National Holiday

Sometimes when you make plans they don’t completely go to plan and sometimes nothing goes to plan.  When I tried going on a trip to Chengdu China to celebrate the National holiday, nothing went to plan.

Our misfortunes began when we tried to book a hotel through Hostel World (which I would not suggest).  We booked two twin suites at the Inn Barsby Hotel in the downtown area of Chengdu and had to pay a ten percent reservation fee of thirty dollars.  The next day we purchased our train tickets in downtown Beibei.  Unfortunately we were not able to buy tickets to arrive on the day that we were supposed to check in at the Inn Barsby Hotel.  This didn’t seem like too big of a problem until I realized that I couldn’t contact the hotel by phone or email.  So we were just going to have to show up and try to explain the situation at the check-in desk.  We left for Chendu on a Monday morning train from Chongqing, so we had to take a bus from Beibei to Chongqing. 

We arrived in Chengdu East Train Station and only had a vague idea on how to get to the hotel, which was all the way over on the west side of the city.  So we just took an hour long bus ride from the train station to the bus station.  When we got there we were lost, other than knowing that we were on the west side of the city.  Fortunately we met some very nice Chinese girls who wanted to take pictures with us and helped us buy a map and flag down a taxi to take us to the Inn Barsby Hotel.  When we arrived to the hotel, the manager at the check in desk told us that they no longer do bookings through Hostel World so we had no reservation.  This is where the stress really set in.  We were in Chengdu and had no place to stay and could speak very limited Chinese.  Two blocks away from the Inn Barsby Hotel we found another hotel that had rooms for us to stay in.  After looking at the rooms (show rooms) we decided that we should stay there because we probably didn’t really have any other choice.  We paid for two rooms (150RMB per person per night). 

When Ryan and I opened the door to our room and the intense smell of sewage hit our nostrils.  When we stepped in the room, we heard the sound of a gush of water draining through a pipe in the wall.  When we began investigating the room we realized what the smell was.  It really was sewage.  We deduced from the smell and the brown stains on the wall paper and the sound from the pipe that the main sewage vain ran through the wall next to our room and that it must have burst sometime in the near past.  We had not choice though, there wasn’t really any other hotels that we could stay at, we just had to endure.  At this point everyone was very stressed out and needed time alone to calm down and think.  We decided that the next day we would take a train back to Beibei. 

Now our trip to Chengdu wasn’t a total loss.  That evening after everyone had calmed down we met up with a Chinese friend of mine and Matt’s to go eat hot pot (famous Sichuan/Chongqing meal) and then go to the bars with her and her friends.  Hot pot was delicious and the bars were a blast.  We went to a bar called SoHo Bar in the southern part of the city.  Immediately after entering the bar we heard the sound of country being sung live by one of the employees of the bar.  He was also playing and acoustic guitar while he sung.  His performance was better than most I have seen in the US.  Also there was a female singer who looked a lot like Lady Gaga and sang just like her.  Things got a little crazy at the club.  At one point I was dragged up on the dance stage by a Chinese girl to dance, though I did jump off after a short while.  Towards the end of our stay I was invited to drink beer with some more Chinese people (I painfully drank the bottle of Budweiser they offered me).  We stayed out at the bars till about 3:30 in the morning. 

The next morning was very ruff waking up.  We quickly ate breakfast and then flagged down a taxi to take us to the East Train Station.  There, we exchanged our old tickets to get new ones so we could leave that day.  Eventually we arrived back to our apartments in Beibei. 

I definitely learned quite a bit from this disastrous trip to Chengdu.  Don’t go traveling during the Chinese National Holiday.