Xian

I know it's been a while since my last post, but that is because I was travelling. We had a week off of class for the week of June 21st, so I took full advantage of the time off. I travelled to Xian and then to Shanghai. This post will just address Xian.

Unlike in the U.S., train is a common form of mass transportation in China and I felt that I had to experience it at least once to fully experience China. The fair was pretty cheap, just 140 yuan to travel from Chengdu to Xian without having to switch trains. I travelled with a fellow student, Maddie, and thank goodness I did, otherwise I would have been bored beyond tears.



There are four types of train cars for which you can buy tickets: hard seats, hard sleepers, soft seats, and soft sleepers -- each varying in price from cheapest to most expensive respectively. Maddie and I took the hard sleepers. The train car was subdivided into six bunks per little room (no door). I took one of the top ones and Maddie the one below mine. About two stops into our journey, a mother and infant joined our little room. Maddie and I were commenting on how cute the baby was when all of a sudden it started peeing on the floor. It ceased to be cute. Now, it's common to find babies peeing on sidewalks all over China, but this was the train car floor!

This is Maddie, eating our delicious train car food. And by delicious, I mean bland. And expensive. And not very filling. And all around dissatisfying.



Our train left at noon on Saturday and was supposed to be 13 hours long, or so we had thought. At about 10pm we learned from one of our bunk-mates that it is a 16 hour train ride. Lucky us there were mechanical problems and we were delayed another 1 and a half, meaning Maddie and I arrived in Xian at about 6:30am.

We took a rickshaw to our hostel where we met up with some of our friends who flew, ate breakfast, and went to see the terracotta soldiers.

The terracotta soldiers site is an active archaeological excavation site. The excavation locations are covered by large enclosures. The soldiers themselves were smashed and the archaeologists are painstakingly digging them up and reassembling them.

On our way back from the terracotta soldiers, which is about a 45 minute bus trip outside of Xian city proper, our bus broke. Mostly broke. The gear shift would not shift above 2nd gear, so the ride back was excruciatingly slow.

After making it back and eating a late lunch, we saw some of the sites around the city. This is the bell tower situated in the heart of Xian. You can go inside it for a small fee, but we were all so tuckered out from our terracotta excursion that we passed on going inside.

For dinner that night, we went to the Muslim Sector for some delicious barbecued lamb. mmmmmmmmmmm. The Muslim Sector is one of the prettiest parts of the city, day or night, and I highly recommend visiting it if you make it to Xian.

The next day, all my travel companions left for Beijing. I didn't leave for Shanghai until the next day, so I had the entire day to myself in Xian. The first day was rainy and miserable, but the second day was beautifully sunny with the bluest sky I've yet to see in this country. I am so glad I decided to stay an extra day in Xian.

This is Culture Street, a.k.a. tourist boutique street. There were a lot of cute things to buy, but I wasn't in much of a mood to shop (shocking: Kirsten didn't want to buy something!).

Along Culture Street is the entrance to an old Confucian School which is now an open air museum. Throughout the entire school grounds are massive stones with passages from the Confucian Analects, Dao De Jing (Tao Te Ching), Book of Rites, and other various texts carved into them. I was in heaven.

Inside this pagoda is one of the largest stones with most of the Laozi (Dao De Jing) carved on it.

This is a Buddhist prayer that was carved on a stone outside of a woman's tomb. It was removed and relocated onto the museum/school grounds.

These are all tomb stones that were transported to the museum.

This little fellow is carved atop a stone pillar that was used for tying up horses. There is a whole collection of these little creatures at the museum.

There was a building with a collection of tomb and temple statuary that was trans-located to the museum. These two are lions that guarded the entrance to a tomb.

After spending too much time in the museum, I decided to take a walk about town and made my way to the canal just south of the south city wall gate.

Lots of fishermen.

And some young fishermen.

After my walk along the canal, I climbed up to the top of the city wall. The city wall is the original, intact city walls from when Xian was the capital of China (then called Chang'an) and the eastern terminus of the Silk Road. The walls have obviously been fixed in places over time, but it is still the original structure. For 20 yuan you can rent a bicycle and ride around the wall, which I did.

One of the tower buildings along the wall.

If you follow the road into the distance, it looks like it runs into a building (which it kind of does). That's the Bell Tower.

On the train to Xian, I met a student at one of the universities in Xian. He invited me to dinner with his girlfriend and introduced me to some of the ethnic Xian (Shaanxi Provincial) foods that I otherwise wouldn't have tried.

After dinner we took a stroll past the Wild Goose Pavilion. Normally you can go inside, but since the earthquake, the city is afraid that the structure is unsafe and won't allow visitors.

In front of the pavilion is an elaborate water fountain that only turns on at noon and 9pm for a fifteen minute show. Not many tourists know about it, so most of the spectators were Chinese. The fountain is a series of fountains that stretches the span of a football field or more and the fountain spouts are choreographed to change along with music. Some of the spectators were gusty and ran through the fountain.

I had to wake up at 4:30am for my flight to Shanghai the next morning. In my hostel room were two French travellers, a mother and daughter. The daughter spoke English and I warned her that I would have to wake up early. Later I tried to relay the same message to her mother, but her mother didn't speak English, so I asked her if she spoke Spanish. No. Italian? No. Chinese? No. I was exasperated. What's the point in speaking 4 languages if you can't communicate with anyone!?! The next morning I was up bright and early to catch my flight to Shanghai . . . but that's for my next post.