From Chengdu we had a pretty average hard-seat overnight trip to Xi'an. Once the silence around me was broken, I chatted to the people around me a bit and ate some of the great fruit offered to me by a man across the aisle. Lots of Chinese people take bags of nuts or small fruits on trains, and I don't know if they're snacks or for the home or what. Auberon was accosted by a few very persistent women who stormed through the language barrier to ask repeatedly for his nonexistent Chinese social media info.
We arrived very late at night and realized that we had come to the south train station, a good distance from the actual city. Some French tourists (also coming from Vietnam in a roundabout way) suggested that we share a taxi, so we walked to the end of the taxi hawkers and got into one that quoted us 50 yuan lower than everybody else. He immediately got lost on his way out of the station street, and the Frenchmen left once he had us all get out to hop a curb. This distressed him greatly, but I understood little of his shouting. Once on the lonely country road he flagged down another taxi and got out to talk with the other driver. This distressed me greatly, and I unbuckled my seatbelt and told him to give us our bags, and we'd walk to Xi'an if we had to. He became much more apologetic, and started the car once more. A short while passed in frosty silence until I started to understand his situation. Half his customers up and left after an embarrassing mistake, and the remaining two were either incomprehensive or bitter. He was just trying to do his job. So I told him that the weather was much nicer in Xi'an than Chengdu, which started the wheels turning a bit. As we got into town he recommended tourist attractions, and offered to call our hotel to make sure he had the right address. We left on friendlier terms.
The next day Auberon and I were seized by a desire to walk really far. His phone has a step counter which gives us a daily goal of 10,000 steps a day, and we generally reach this goal very quickly. Our high water mark was one day in Hoi An where we got to 43,000 since, as he put it, left to our own devices we just wander all day. Since then one or both of us has been laid ill or we've had company not as willing to put in the mileage. With both of us healthy and rested, the day promised to be one for the books.
Our meandering took us in a general southerly direction past the tall banks and malls of the city center. We came to a museum by and by, which my research had said was boring but we found perfectly nice. We continued our habit of presenting various cards from our wallets and claiming that they're foreign student IDs, which so far has a 2/3 success rate. I do have my actual student ID, but the picture on it wore off years ago leaving only a smudge. In the museum, I was particularly taken with the colored jade sculptures. In the shape of soldiers and animals, these used some combination of the natural color of the jade and a glaze to give a three color effect to the pieces. Usually I just breeze past glass cases with sculptures, but these really did catch my eye.
We also found a nice tangle of alleyways in a style I had always imagined to be in Chinese cities: steam rising from street vendors' pots, clamoring crowds, and signs poking out overhead. The signs are probably the interesting point for me, since at first glance I can't read a thing. Little by little more emerges as I keep looking: noodles, beef, pork buns, fried rice. Auberon and I were close to the same level of being able to read food words in Chinese when we began the trip, so by now we've both picked up a lot of the common characters.
Xi'an has famous city walls, and they pair with a moat to encircle the old town. We walked halfway around the seven-mile loop and admired the effect the sunset had on the lanterns and watchtowers. It was very pretty and quite a draw for the Chinese tourists, many of whom mounted bicycles or trams to go around. The walls walked, we cut through the huge shopping complex in the center to end up with a step count of 53000, or just over 30 miles. I'm not itching to break that record anytime soon.
The next day we went to see the biggest draw of Xi'an, the terracotta warriors. It was sadly extremely hot, so our visit wasn't quite as leisurely as the place may have deserved. I was advised to see the excavated pits in reverse order, since pit one is the grandest one that all the pictures show. They recently started showing the excavation and restoration process right there in the viewing areas, which would have been nice if anyone had been there working that day. It was still neat to see the tools and equipment, including some process of shrink-wrapping the soldiers, possibly for moving elsewhere.
After bussing back to the city we kept up our walking by finding several big malls in the city center and seeing what they had to offer each time. Beginning with the Vietnamese markets and malls, each of these big Western style shopping centers has offered us a slightly different experience. Sometimes we get gawked at, other times not, sometimes the brands or slogans are hilarious, other times familiar. In this plaza we found little strangeness, but there's something relaxing about the constant stream of placid music and bright storefronts.
The next day we left our bags in the hotel and set out once more. It was a sweltering day, seemingly taunting me for praising the weather in the taxi. We walked a good distance around the moat surrounding the old city. The authorities put some big fences and gates up to deter people from getting too close to the river (which was a brilliant green). Nevertheless there was a second path that was relatively shady and we spent lots of time on it. The path had a very dead riverfront bar and café complex and the usual assortment of Asian bodyweight exercise machines.
Once tired out from the heat and exercise, we found a tea house where we could sit and play chess. It turned out that it was far pricier than anywhere else we had been in recent days, so we ordered the cheapest tea and played for hours. It was a very long game ending in stalemate, and both of us had shaky hands at the end from dozens of cups of tea.
In the evening we collected our bags, hailed a taxi to the train station, and rode off into the night, to the plains and deserts of the north.
Pictured: tea and chess, a nostalgic Sichuan meal, and us with some clay guys.
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