China Day 1 - Xi'An

 

Our Hostel in Xi'An

Downstairs

Bridge Railing outside of Old City Wall

Grrr

Moat around old city wall in Xi'An

Sweet Potato Vendor

Me in China

Small Goose Pagoda

Old Carriage

I thought she was cute

She is cute too, in her own way.

Drum Tower Xi'An

Mystery Street Food in Muslim Quater

Chinese Mosque

Prayer Times

Inside Mosque Grounds

At 6:00 a.m. on December 26, after two relaxing weeks of mom’s home cooking and lots of rejuvenating TLC, I boarded a plane bound for Houston, Texas. And then another bound for Tokyo, Japan. And another bound for Ho Chi Minh City. Seven hours after I’d arrived, Steven and I were back at the airport boarding a plane bound for Guangzhou China. Six hours later, we boarded another plane bound for Beijing. After a brief 13 hours in Beijing, we boarded our final flight for Xi’an, China. By 9:00 a.m. on Tuesday, December 29, I had spent 44 of the previous 65 hours either on a plane, or in an airport. By 7:00 that night, I was so tired that I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry, so I did a little of both, at the same time, causing my poor confused husband to excuse himself to the hostel bar for a beer, while I settled in for what turned out to be a 14 hour sleep.

Despite the delirium and jet lag, on my part, Steven and I managed to enjoy our time in Xi’an. A city often passed through by travelers on a quest to see the nearby Terra Cotta Warriors, we found Xi’an to be a worthy destination unto itself.

We arrived in Xi’an at 9:00 a.m on Tuesday morning and boarded a bus from the airport to the city center. We’d read that the airport shuttle dropped passengers off at the Bell Tower, which was not far from our chosen Hostel, Shuyuan International Youth Hostel. Once at the Bell Tower, we stopped into a McDonald’s (at my request, needing something familiar after countless airplane meals and much to Steven dismay) for a quick snack. While we were seated at our table, a Chinese woman walked by us and sat herself down at a table about three feet away, faced towards us, and commenced an intense, unnerving stare. Somewhat used to being stared at by now, after a few cursory glances, I turned to her and stared back, a tactic that usually causes the offender to glance quickly away. The woman was not deterred. She simply stared back. I gave Steven my best, “Can you believe this woman?” look and we both turned to look at her – the double stare – an almost fool-proof defense against ogling strangers. Nothing. She continued to stare. I found myself looking out the window behind me to see if perhaps she was staring at something over my shoulder, but there was nothing that appeared to be holding her attention. Finally I suggested to Steven, seeing as we didn’t know which way to go once we left the restaurant, that we ask our neighbor for directions, thinking that perhaps, she was merely a curious woman with a lack of understanding of what passes for proper social etiquette in the western world. So I unfolded our map and turned to her, motioning to the road outside and pointing at the map. She smiled and took the map from me, pointed at the Bell Tower on the map and gestured out of the restaurant to the left. Thinking myself clever for having turned an awkward situation into a positive interaction, I smiled in return, thanked her using one of my two Mandarin phrases, the other being “Hello,” and folded up our map.

As Steven and I got up to leave the restaurant, we noticed that our onlooker got up from her table just as we did. When we exited the restaurant, we noticed that she too exited the restaurant. When we turned towards the left, toward the Bell Tower, she was right there, not a foot away. I looked over at her and she pointed towards the Bell Tower. I nodded, thanked her again, and Steven and I quickened our pace. She quickened her pace. We ducked around an oncoming crowd, she was right behind. I grabbed Steven’s arm and led him up a short flight of stairs and began pointing at a building in the distance pretending to admire the scenery. She stopped and waited for us to continue. “What do we do?” I asked.

“We shouldn’t have asked her for directions. She probably wants money,” Steven reasoned. But she hadn’t held out her hand. She just followed and stared.

“Let’s walk. Fast!” I whispered and we walked back down the steps and on to the sidewalk. By the time we got to the corner, we were at a fast gallop, staring straight ahead. We ducked down into the subway and finally managed to get lost in a crowd.

When Steven looked up the stairs from which we’d came, she was nowhere to be found. Breathing a sigh of relief, I was reminded of a lesson I learned during a trip to Mexico years ago – never pet a stray dog, unless you want to be followed by a pack of street dogs for the rest of the day. I will add a lesson to that - hopefully without seeming to compare curious Chinese to stray dogs – if someone stars at you from three feet away like a crazy person on a street on China, it’s probably best just to keep on walking, fast. Or perhaps that will just leave them thinking that you’re the crazy person…

Once we’d shaken our pursuer, we managed to get ourselves in the vicinity of our hostel using the instructions on the hostel printout I had brought with us. I had written down the address of the hostel and the directions from the Bell Tower, but we had neglected to bring a map, and even if we had, it may not have done us that much good. Apparently the Chinese don’t see the need to put the names of their streets in any language other than – Chinese. Nor, apparently, do many Chinese in Xi’an find the need to speak English, as they live in China, where everything is in Chinese. So we wandered around lost for about an hour, before we realized that the name of the hostel was written on my paper in Chinese and managed to find a friendly shop keeper who pointed us in the right direction.

Once we found our hostel, we dumped our bags and headed back out to explore the city. We walked south of the city wall to the Little Goose Temple, then back north to the city gate, stopping to buy some expensive tangerines along the way. Having subsisted on little outside of airplane fare, and now McDonalds, for the past three days, I was craving fresh fruit, but initially hesitated before approaching the fruit vendor in the street. I found myself in an interesting situation - having lived as an expat for a year and a half now and feeling at home in a "foreign" culture, it had been a while since we had found ourselves in a country where we didn't speak the language, nor have any clue how much a kilo of tangerines should cost. After such a long time of relative comfort in my surroundings, it seemed an extraordinary burden to have to pantomime how much I wanted to buy and hold out my fingers as a request for a sign of cost. After all, I live in Asia! I've spent quite a bit of time travelling in other countries. Had expat life made me lazy? Apparently, it had. But not lazy enough to deny us the treat of some overpriced Chinese street tangerines.

We returned to the old city and made our way to the train ticket station. Once there Steven waited at the window in the front of the line for 10 minutes, as the woman behind the counter with a abacus on her desk repeatedly rebooted her computer trying to get it to print our tickets. As he waited for our tickets, I sat on the sidewalk to rest my aching feet, eliciting the attention and continuous frenzied barking of a Chinese poodle, which was obviously not used to, nor fond of, non-Chinese people. Finally, Steven was able to purchase two soft-sleeper tickets on a Z train north to Beijing for the following evening.

Once we had our tickets, not wanting to resign ourselves to the hostel quite so early, we continued north, towards to Drum Tower, where we marveled over intricate Chinese furniture and other works of art, and found a great vantage point from which to watch the city below.

Xi'an, as most of the little we saw of China, is quite modern and developed, but as we soon learned, there are a few jems - little alleys lined with old-style houses, crowded with street vendors and packed with people, bicycles, carts, cars and all other forms of transportation. One such areas is Xi'an's Muslim quarter which we found while seeking out thje Great Mosque of Xi'an, one of the largest and most well preserved ancient Mosque in China.

After touring the Mosque and walking all over Xi'an with only tangerines as fuel, Steven and I were drawn to the numerous the Muslim quarter's many street vendors. Again, not being familiar with local prices or local food, I was a bit intimidated, but finally honed in on a wok filled with what looked like cubed potatoes and green onions with other spices and garnishes, none that looked remotely like meat, so we pointed to a bowl and were ushered inside a small restaurant to the back.

One thing that I have neglected to mention so far in my tale of China is the temperature. It was the first thing we noticed when we stepped off the plane in Beijing and the one enduring feature of our week in China that continuously made itself known. It was Freezing! So perhaps it was the respite from the cold, or my seemingly never ending hunger or just being able to sit somewhere and rest for a time when they delivered our bowl of mystery cubes, but whatever it was, Steven and I soon found ourselves hungrily devouring our bowl of what turned out to be, not potatoes, but some gelatinous mystery cubes – gluten perhaps? – with great gusto.

After we’d finished up our meal, we wandered back out onto the street and made a few more purchases, me – a mixed bag of dried fruit – and Steven – a bag of shelled walnuts, and we walked back to our hostel where my aforementioned exhaustion fueled breakdown occurred and I settled into my first full night sleep in four days.