Shopping in Chengdu: IFS, the Global Center, and Raffles City
Hi! It's been a while. Guess what? I still have a ton of China photos I haven't sorted through yet. Are you surprised? Me, either!I thought I'd put together a quick post with photos from a few of the malls I visited in China. There were a lot, and they were all pretty fancy. The first mall was called Raffles City and it was the one located just one subway stop away from my apartment in Chengdu.
I visited this particular jianbing restaurant for dinner so often that I started to recognize and hope for a certain jianbing maker (that's him in the photo) because I thought his were the best.
I mentioned this in my China Food Diary post, but jianbing is something I fell in love with quickly and I consumed so many while I was in China. It's basically an egg crepe filled with chips, lettuce, hot sauce, and mayo. You could order meat ones, too, but I'm a vegetarian so I always ordered the same thing. After a long day at school (9:00-5:00 some days) I'd jump on the subway and look forward to eating a delicious jianbing for dinner. Anna came with me once but she ordered the cold noodles instead which she really enjoyed. Raffles City was only one subway stop away from her apartment as well, so she visited the same restaurant often just to eat the cold noodles!
Another mall I visited was The Global Center which is the biggest building in the world! It's so big, there's even an ice rink AND a full waterpark inside. As a result, the mall was really, really humid and uncomfortable to walk around in.
I went with my roommates, Erica and Morgan one afternoon, and we couldn't figure out what we wanted to do because the place was just massive and most of the stores were expensive designer names we couldn't afford anyway. After doing laps around the food court, we reluctantly ended up eating cheese pizza and french fries at this American restaurant and just dripped in sweat the entire time. Overall it was a pretty miserable experience, haha but I'm still glad we went to check it out! Who knew shopping at an indoor mall would be so hot and sticky!?
On one of my last days in Chengdu, Anna and I visited IFS (the International Finance Square). I actually just had to look up what that stands for since we always referred to it as, "the panda building," simply because there's a giant panda climbing up the side of the building.
These big rings played music when you walked through them. It was pretty cool! I think this was one of the few days it wasn't super, super hot outside!
"The Chengdu International Finance Square (IFS) opened in January 2014 and has brought about 300 luxury, jewelry and fashion labels to the city. Occupying the most coveted location within the core business district at the heart of downtown Chengdu, IFS has become one of the trendiest and upscale shopping complexes in the city. It covers a business space of 760,000 square meters for a shopping center involving hundreds of international brands, a boutique hotel, high-end office building, an IMAX movie theater, a supermarket and a bookstore. More than 70 restaurants offering various cuisines are part of the shopping center." (Source)
After wandering around the mall for a while, we finally located the giant panda! We waited in line and had a stranger snap some photos of us in front of it. For some reason there were Smurfs everywhere - I'm assuming there was a recent Smurfs movie release? Not sure. We embraced it, though.
I'm glad Anna was able to hang out with me in China. It's always fun having a travel buddy! Also, after going through these photos, I can't believe how many other China photos I still want to post! And now I'm hungry for jianbing... :) As always, thanks for reading! xo