she-ann

my mouth just cannot speak chinese properly. for some reason yuan (the money) is you-awn, but xian is she-ann. i can't even do it the way they do it. anyway, i am in xian. it is a very old city, much older than beijing. there are walls still surrounding the main part of the city, the only one in china with the walls still standing. they restored them in the 1980's, so they look really new. i walked about 3 miles on top of the walls today. i like xian much better than beijing, so far. it is more like what i expected china to be like. but let me back up and talk about my journey.

i took the bicycle back yesterday and picked up my train ticket, only to find out that the train was leaving an hour earlier than they'd told me and from a station that was twice as far away as they'd told me. i had planned to take a taxi, but to that station it would have been relatively expensive. so they told me about a bus to take, so i grabbed my stuff and headed to the bus stop. i was unsure of whether i was making the right move, because the train station was to the southwest, and i had to head east for 10 minutes to get the bus. after waiting 20 minutes, the bus came and i luckily got the last seat available, because soon the bus was crammed solid with people. at the first intersection, the bus turned north, making me more anxious. it finally turned south and west, though, and 75 minutes later i spilled out at the beijing west train station. i'd misread the book before, because this station is definitely the biggest in china. i can't imagine a bigger train station. it seems bigger than the pentagon, but is lacking the 5-sided shape. amazingly, i quickly found my platform and train, then walked about a mile to get to the right track and car. i had a ticket in what they call 'hard-sleeper', which usually has 6 beds crammed, 3 high on each side of a little compartment. i got lucky though and had one on the end that only had 2 beds...i was in the upper one. there are also fancier soft sleepers for twice the price, then the hard seats, which are just what the name sounds like. i sat on the platform and ate some food quickly before the train left, and while there i met this guy from san francisco who sold his backpacker travel business and retired at age 36 a few months ago, and is now traveling around china trying to get a visa to visit north korea. he'd been in mongolia for 3 weeks traveling around the countryside on a motorcycle with a case of vodka. interesting guy. i talked to him most of the evening, and also to a chinese doctor that is trying to move to london. the train actually moved pretty fast, and didn't make that many stops. on the map on here, it looks like i barely went anywhere from beijing, but it was a 14 hour train trip! the countryside was pretty, and i saw a lot of rice paddies, machine planted. we passed innumerable villages and i saw many people walking around, from town to farm and back, apparently. i slept much better than i had on the trains in australia, as it was nice to lie down. but i still only slept about 4 hours. it wasn't too bad. then we pulled into xian at a little after 6am. some other train showed up at the same time, and there were suddenly about 20,000 chinese people flooding the platform and the tunnel out to the station. it was just a human wave, much like i pictured all of china to be like. the station was just chaotic, and suddenly everyone spoke english enough to tell me about their great hotel i should stay at. luckily, i'd already booked a room, and a girl was there with my name on a sign, so that made it easy. i'm staying right next to the city wall.

the first thing i did was one of the most famous tourist attractions in china, the xian terra cotta warriors. they were unearthed near the tomb of the first emperor of a united china, from over 2000 years ago. it's quite an archeological find. there were 2 giant pits, bigger than several football fields, and 1 smaller one, full of these life-size figures of soldiers and horses. the chinese excavation methods are very slow, i've read, and in fact they've been at it for 27 years and are only about 1/10th done. it was an interesting thing to see. i met these 2 girls who are english students and went to lunch with them and their friends. even with them helping, it was still very difficult to figure out what i was ordering. the food was all good though, and i'm getting better at my chopstick usage, out of sheer necessity. oh, i took public buses to get there and back, which was fun. i was the only non-chinese person on board, so everyone stared at me the whole time...i sat in the back and they all must have sore necks now. i felt like i should do a juggling act and ask for tips or something. once back in town, i dove into the chaos of the train station to get my trip out of here scheduled. i am heading to chongqing to catch a boat on the yangzi river. i found out some disturbing things as i bought my ticket. 1: it is a 26 hour train trip to chongqing. 2: there are no sleepers at all available...they are all full. 3: i had to buy a hard seat ticket. this adds up to not much fun for me. but we'll see what happens...they said it might be possible to upgrade once i'm on the train.

after that i walked on the wall for a couple hours. tomorrow i will rent a bicycle and see more of xian, and maybe ride on the wall if i can. the girl that picked me up at the railroad station and her friend also like practicing their english, so i asked them to go out with me tonight and show me the local food. xian has a large population of the hui people, a muslim ethnic minority in china. most chinese people are the han ethnic group. anyway, xian has some specialty foods that i wanted to try. i tried a few of them tonight, and will try another one tomorrow night. the best tonight was these little delicate dumplings with soup and meat in them. i had mutton, beef, and chicken. i found out later they also have rabbit and camel, which i would tried if i'd have known. tomorrow night is a dish that starts with crumbling some flat bread into a bowl, then filling it with mutton stew or something. i like these meat dishes.

one nice thing about xian compared to beijing is that it seems more manageable. the streets aren't 12 lanes wide and it seems more human, i guess. it's hard to define. i'll see how tomorrow goes. oh, someone asked, and i really don't know, but it might be true that beijing is the biggest city in the world...it is bigger than shanghai, which i found out yesterday, so it's certainly up there, and definitely the biggest in china. i am feeling much better about china now that i am out of there, though.