Lee and Clare, The road home

Wierd Stuff in Xi'an

7^th November 2003

Greetings from Xi'an in Shaanxi Province.

We were ready to leave Beijing and get on the road again and we arrived in Pingyao after a 12 hour train ride.

This is a really amazing old traditional city encircled by what may be the last surviving completely intact Ming Dynasty wall in China. Think traditional old Chinese and this town is it. Everything has remained unchanged since its heyday in the Ming and Quing Dynasties as it fell into poverty soon after so was never modernised. Our hotel here was fantastic, the best place we've stayed so far. Our room was off a traditional courtyard hung in red lanterns and our bed was heated underneath with hot bricks. We met a local man who showed us around the town taking us places where we wouldn't normally see, down small alleyways, into courtyards and onto roofs. We also visited one of his friend's houses and his own house where we met his 85 year od mother and his sister. It was great to look around with him as he could tell us things that we never would have normally noticed. Like twice he stopped at the entrances to courtyards and read something in Chinese outside that someone from the family had died. Then he took us into the courtyard to see where the coffin was laid out. Adults are left out in the courtyard for 9 days before they are buried. An altar and lots of decorations are put around their coffin. It was quite bizarre. On both occasions the family came out to meet us ( we felt a bit uncomfortable at first) and talked about the person who had died, translated by our guide. Felt quite weird but our guide said that "We all die one day", they didn't feel uncomfortable about hangin' out in the courtyard with us and a coffin.

There were MANY ripe smells in Pingyao. We don't think they can have a sewerage system. Our guide explained some of the smell to us when we walked past a horse and carriage on the street and a man carrying some full buckets from someone's house to the carriage which had a big cylinder on the back made from thick rubber. Mmmmm.

Our guide also took us to a place where we could climb up onto the city wall for free. He agiley got up there in a few seconds but we were too wussy. It was about 10 metres high and the footholds weren't that big for a European foot.

Had some yummy food there too, we were sad to leave! But we had to get onto another night train to Xi'an. We met a funny Chinese guy at the station who knew all about Maori people. He had perfect English, which is quite unusual we've found. He said he taught himself from books. Our guide in Pingyao said he taught himself English from the radio 20 years ago (he was in his 50s).

Xi'an has a population of over 6.5 million and also has quite a few rank smells - maybe the smelliest place we've been on our travels. Yesterday we got a local minibus out to see the Army of the Teracotta Warriors. The Chinese people call them the 8th Wonder of the World. They say this is the biggest tomb unearthed in the world and it dates from 2000 years ago. Some farmers came across the site in the 70s while digging a well and further digging found 6000 teracotta figures, horses and chariots complete with weapons that were still sharp. A good film of photos was taken here, another one to add to the masses accumulating in our packs. Pretty cool place to see. When we went out the front gate at the end we were almost literally ATTACKED by souvenir sellers. It was quite hilarious, we couldn't move anywhere because of all the postcards and teracotta figures being thrust at us from all angles about 4 rows deep and as we managed to shuffle forward the prices being yelled at us dropped dramatically. We did end up with some tacky stuff of course.

The funniest thing happened when we got on the bus back to Xi'an (though you probably had to be there). A lady was literally running after the bus with these big teracotta figures. We thought, Oh yeah, they're ok, let's buy one so Lee was doing some heavy bartering out the window as the bus moved. We thought she said 5 yuan so Lee passed out the money, she took it and he went to take the figure but she wouldn't let go of it, so Lee let go suddenly, her arm sprung back and the figure smacked against another one in her hand, the head broke off, the bus took off and she was left holding the money. Everyone on the bus (all Chinese) was in hysterics. It was worth losing the 5 yuan (50c) for the spectacle!

Today we went out on another local bus to see a 5500 year old Neolithic village a bit out of the city. When we got there we found that the site was closed for refurbishment but parts of the museum were still open. A man who we met on the bus who lived nearby came back to the museum with his 12-year-old daughter so she could practice her English on us, she was so good for a 12 year old! They took us to look all around the museum. They were such nice people! We also posed for some more photos with some Chinese teenagers. We're getting used to being models!

We've seen some pretty weird stuff today. Guess with a population so big there's gotta be all sortsof stuff going on every day. We saw a guy by the train station lying on the ground making sounds like he was dying while a huge group of spectators huddled around him, all watching, noone doing anything. Then a similar situation by the museum with an old man lying in the middle of the road moaning with loads of people standing around, no-one moving him off the road, and one man even taking a video.

We also saw 4 men walking around and around in circles around some rocks endlessly (we think this is something to do with Buddhism?), a man stamping around doing something that resembled a haka (maybe something to do with tai chi?). But out of all the weird things we've seen today, we are by far the thing that turns heads the most. Everywhere we go people stop what they are doing, open their mouths and stare at us. Even if they are on a bike they'll keep looking back for ages. We're surprised we haven't caused a crash yet. People don't smile when they stare at you. We are trying to work out how to make people smile.

The other thing is that loads of people, especially children, yell out "HELLO" to you as you go past. We always say hello, or Ni Hao back to them and this often starts off fits of laughter.

Today we had a huuuge audience as we went to make a purchase from a man selling some nutty cake stuff on the side of the road. It was like lets watch the foreigners get ripped off. The guy kept on changing the price as the audience grew larger and we're guessing people were egging him on. Everyone was in fits of laughter when in the end we gave up on the whole thing and walked away after he had cut the cake into little pieces for us.

We've just been wandering around the centre of town, the Oxford Street of Xi'an. It's quite westernised in the centre here apart from some big Chinese pagodas and stinky markets. We've just bought a load of dodgy CD's to cart around with us for the next few months to add to our tacky teracotta warriors we got yesterday.

We bought another train ticket today. We are off to Lanzhou in Gansu Province tomorrow on another night train. We are going to hang out on the eastern side of the Tibetan mountains for the next week or two looking at some small places and alpine scenery. One of the places is 10,000 feet above sea level so we'll have to get out our warm Mongolian clothes again. Hopefully we won't get altitude sickness, good excuse to get a taxi from the station to our guest house with our heavy packs.

We've been mastering all the local buses here in Xi'an, now we've got to find another one to get back to our hostel. The weather outside is very Irelandish - moist air, what the Irish would call "soft" and we would call yucky not quite rain.

Anyways, must off, gotta find some snake on a stick for dinner or maybe some steamed birds nest with sea cucumber, or how about stewed pigeon with medicinal materials (all things we've seen on menus so far).

Talk soon
Us