Obsessed with this skyline. If you told me that I would be staring down Chongqing's skyline and walking its embarcadero 3 years ago, I would have not believed you. Life's like that though, expect the unexpected.
Ight enough with the one-liners, here's how the day went.
We started around 10 AM, and took the Yangtze River Cableway to the Longmenhao Residential district.
I wish I had photos of the cableway, but we were so packed in like sardines, I could not get my phone out my pocket.
Here's what it should "ideally" look like:
Here's the view of the Chongqing Skyline during the day from Longmenhao District. It really does look like Manhattan from Brooklyn.
The Longmenhao district was pretty dead, so we decided to should come back later, but here are some photos.
From Longmenhao, we decided to head to the famous Zhongshuge bookstore.
But when we go there it was permanently closed since 2024. Google or the person running the Google page should have updated users instead of wasting our time. China banned Google so I do not blame them. We then headed to Liziba Station, where the train goes through a building.
It would have been much cooler if we could have ridden the train, but we needed a Chinese phone number to ride transit in Chongqing.
There were so many people, so we were only there for a good 5 minutes.
If the train was upside down, it would be more accurate to the Cyberpunk Edgerunners maglev train:
I will probably get some hate from that comment, but I will go into further detail on my Letterboxd if you all actually care about my opinion 🤣.
Cole was not feeling too hot at this point, so he decided to head back to the hotel. I was now on my own in Chongqing, the Cyberpunk City. If I was alone in Oakland, I would be shaking in my boots, given my boots were not already stolen at that point 💀. With my first expedition, I decided to hike up the mountain from Liziba Station to TESTBED 2 (Erchang Creative Park).
TESTBED 2 was pretty much a dud, but pretty nice view.
From TESTBED 2, I decided to head to E'ling Park.
Liziba Station, TESTBED 2, and E'ling Park are all within the same vicinity. It's just the walking that gets you because you quite literally walk up a hill or mountain in this case.
I really wish China had the same amount of respect that Japan has for their parks. Maybe instead of continuing to build skyscrapers, the PRC should invest money into maintaining their public parks not just the ones in Beijing!
Here are some more views of Chongqing from E'ling Park:
China is truly insane. How they have a population of 1.405 billion amazes me, but also saddens me how big the disparity of wealth is.
Here are some more money shots of E'ling Park I took:
From E'ling Park I decided back to Longmenhao. It was about 4 PM, I wanted to explore the ancient street, and see Chongqing light up. Calling a taxi took forever because my phone was not registering signal for some odd reason. It was super frustrating, but I was eventually able to do it.
Turns out I accidentally paid for the most expensive taxi, $15 for a 40-minute drive! I freaked out over the price, but I quickly realized I should have been more freaked out over my driver! He was on TikTok and driving! I'd argue doom-scrolling and driving is more dangerous than drinking than driving, but no one should research that!
Longmenhao Old Street was pretty underwhelming! Everything was gentrified and overpriced like Shibati the day before, and super-crowded. I would have more photos, but all my photos would just be full of people in the background, and you cannot see the actual ancient architecture. I did take one photo though.
From Longmenhao Old Street, I decided to go and hike up to Nanshan Botanical Garden. The hike would have been much quicker if I had a better sense of direction and was not sidetracked so easily. A lot of my video footage on the DJI camera is from this hike alone because the places I saw along the way are just insane. I could not believe people lived in such conditions and how much I take for granted back home is such a luxury for them. In Chongqing you can go from looking at a futuristic utopia to Cultural Revolution dystopia in one wrong turn. I am thankful that I took the walk and did not taxi up to the mountain because I had to see for myself. Walking is the best form of transportation, you really get to live the experience and immerse yourself in the environment. When you're driving or on the train, these places fly by like postcards, and you never think of it or people there. I thought this was bad originally:
There was so much worse than this little street and those buildings. As I walked further, I got stares from people, and never felt so bad about myself ever. I saw families and kids with absolutely nothing, and I could not offer them anything because China is cashless, plus they did not have their AliPay or WeChat code. Honestly I do not know how to feel if a homeless person had their WeChat code out there for people to scan, it's like if a homeless person panned out a credit card reader with a tip questionnaire in North America.
I eventually made it to where I was supposed to be on the trail, and getting to Nanshan Botanical Garden was a straight shot.
Admission was about $4.50. Not sure if it was really a botanical garden or more of an observatory because I did not see many plants, maybe I was not looking hard enough. The latter is more likely 😂. Here are the photos!
You can take me out the Bay, but you can not take the Bay out of me 😂.
By this point I had 27,000 steps already. I was gassed, so I decided to camp out at the botanical garden, and wait for the lights to come on. I waited at this spot standing for a good 35 minutes, so the crowd would not budge in, and I would be priority in getting my photos first. Best decision I made because it became packed. Here's the sunset photos:
I have a video of the lights coming on, I will share on the YouTube. I probably have to make a whole separate video for Chongqing or else my video is going to be over an hour long.
You see the bite on my left leg? I was getting eaten alive in China. I never fought the urge to itch so hard.
I did the wrong hand again 🤦♂️.
If I did climb the bear, I probably would be arrested! From Nanshan Botanical Garden, I took a taxi to Chongqing Grand Theatre. I wanted to catch a show, but I messed up the timing. It would have been nice to see a show, but the building and the architecture are worth it by itself!
Chongqing is definitely the most insane city I have ever visited, and I can not overstate it enough! Just look at these photos. I did not even use filters.
Since I could not catch a show at the threatre, I decided to walk back to the hotel. I am so glad I did that because it made me so happy and felt so surreal.
It's funny how I walked across the Chongqing bridge before I walked across the Golden Gate Bridge, and I have been living in the Bay Area for more than 10 years now!
Chongqing Grand Theatre really does look like the Sydney Opera House. I am probably wrong because I have yet to go to Australia.
I ended the day early because we had an early flight to Shanghai, and I needed to pack!
Chongqing was a fun city and aside from Chengdu, the most enjoyable city on the trip. I would love to visit again with my brothers and hopefully the city can fix the living condition problems for their less fortunate people. I doubt it, but everything and every one is worth saving! China needs to address the consequences of their one-child policy first though! I came up on this video quite some time ago, it is worth a watch and a good 16 minutes!
One of the comments is "It's not 30 million extra men. It's 30 million missing women" and another one about the "dating coach" being "the blind leading the blind vro😭" had me rolling on the floor laughing 💀.
As I was walking Jiefangbei Square at night, I saw a lot of men try to catcall women on the street. Not sure if they had a dating-coach or not, but it looked worse than Shaq at the free throw line.
Then again:
I think this is an important topic of discussion not just in China, but globally, because modern connection, and a good majority of my generation's sense of worth is broken.
Whether it’s Instagram, X, dating apps, or even LinkedIn, it's all the same thing. People form these parasocial relationships with highly curated, polished photos, but there’s zero realness behind it. Nothing feels genuine or authentic anymore. Your entire human value is diminished down to a left swipe or a two-second like animation. And now, with Ditto AI, people are trusting an algorithm to decide who 'the one' is for them. It’s all pure performance. Everyone is constantly keeping up with the Joneses, anxious to perform for an audience, obsessed with what people think of them.
And honestly? I am a hypocrite. I had that exact same mindset in school, spending so much time obsessed with grades, GPA, and numbers on a transcript—chasing this illusion of perfection instead of allowing myself to just be human, fail, live, and learn from it. We treat our lives like a resume or a profile page where every single metric has to be flawless and every flaw an indictment on ourselves. I like to sit here and pretend I don’t care what anyone thinks, but that’s an obvious lie.
This is cognitive dissonance (learned this in school 🤣), and it's human. We all wear the armor of being "nonchalant" and pretending not to care, but it's just a defense mechanism because, at the end of the day, I am just as insecure as everyone else (I just like to think I do a better job at hiding it 😅). Like Drake said on Look What You've Done (favorite song by the way!), "Just another kid that's going through life so worried that I won't be accepted".
People hear Drake, I listen to him, there's a huge difference between the two. My mom is going to rip into me for spending too much time memorizing trivial lyrics and writing this log instead of studying to get my GPA up, but like this Goodwill Hunting scene:
'at least I won't be unoriginal'
A lot of my colleagues have portfolio, personal websites, but I do not know many or any who runs a weblog. Nobody doing it like me 😤.
I built myself a space to share commentary, tell the full story, and share detailed photos of my trips meaningfully. There are no likes or comment feature on this site, and I am pretty unfiltered. To quote Spider-Man, "If you have a problem with me, (with what I say/said) text me. And if you don't have my number, you don't know me well enough to have a problem with me."
This is more of my actual logs than a travel log 🤣 Any ways, hit next to read my adventures in Shanghai!