Name: 嘉陵公园 | Jialing Park
Where: 重庆市江北区 | Jiangbei, Chongqing, China
What to do: Get away from the Guayinqiao Commercial Street and enjoy a small green space in Chongqing. See some funny signs.
Getting there: Exit the Guanyinqiao subway station and it’s next to the Walking Street.
Cost: Free
Green space is an uncommon sight inside the city of Chongqing. Despite being a city built on rocky and hilly terrain, it has adapted with stairs up cliffs, 13-storey pedestrian walkways, and tunnels everywhere. With all this odd construction in unconventional places, what few parks and gardens do exist tend to be manmade afterthoughts added to the city either along with new construction or on top of existing buildings.
An interesting one of these afterthought parks is Jialing Park, a green space in the Guanyinqiao shopping area on the northern side of the city of Chongqing. You wouldn’t think so to look at it, but the entire park is built over top a subterranean mall, which 2 escalators on either side of the park lead to.
One entrance to Jialing Park.
Completely artificial stream looping the park.
As always in China, plenty of surveillance.
On a rare sunny day walking around in Guanyinqiao, I went into the park for a slight change of scenery and was quite amused by the park’s version of “Keep off the Grass” signs. Whether intentionally funny or just another example of bad translation or ‘Engrish‘, they also seemed to be somewhat deep and philosophical in an offbeat way.
