Xi’an in pictures
Published June 2, 2011
During our last day in Beijing, Matt and I bought our train tickets to Xi’an and were sitting comfortably in the north train station waiting for our high speed train that wasn’t arriving quite high speed enough. We had got here early so we paced around a packed station. “How come the chinese characters don’t match up Matt? It doesn’t make any sense that it’s not on the board.”
“Maybe we’re too early.”
“But there’s only 30 minutes left, I thought these trains are like clockwork in China. Let’s ask someone.”
after waving various hand motions and a pinch of broken mandarin, the lady says to us,
“You’re at the wrong station.”
Everything moved slower for the next 10 seconds as my brain processed the exact words and repercussions of what we were about to face. In seconds, my body span, clinched to gather strength and I thought in slow motion, “two stations!? I didn’t know there were two stations!”, “Taxi or subway?”, “How much time left?!”, “man I could use some hot pot”, “Shit!”. I remember we both moved in unison as if somehow our mutual motions of fear and aggressiveness combined would create a more powerful being. Kind of like, in transformers when the smaller tonka trucks combine to make a more powerful awesome mega robot? Yeah.
We ran like zombies were chasing our asses, then jumped into a cab and screamed, “SOUTH TRAIN STATION!” As luck would have it we hit every red light. I gazed worriedly at the clock every couple seconds which only made the taxi ride that much longer. When I finally saw the station we had 10 minutes left, so I opened the door as I felt the car slowing down. I was halfway out of the cab and the cabbie SPED UP the car.
“WHAT THE FUCK!” I cried in disbelief, my skin painting the pavement.
“He says you can’t get off here, or he’ll get ticketed by that cop over there.”
“… LOOK AT MY FUCKING LEG!”
He let us off a bit further and we dashed into the station only to be held up by security. Thankfully the concept of lineups don’t exist in China so we pushed our way to the front and busted through to see the main timetable. It’s harder to read when you force yourself to do it, but eventually we made sense of the continuously rotating timetables.
Seeing the train at the gate was the biggest relief and after jumping aboard, we just made it with minutes to spare. The whistle wailed and like that, we were on to our next destination. I sat staring out the window at the stream of lights trailing by. As I calmed my heavy breathing, I thought that this was just another one of those crazy experiences that you only get when you are willing to laugh at yourself and the unpredictability of real life. Then I rolled up my jeans and cleaned up my leg.
I woke up quite groggy. Sleeping on a train that continuously shifts left and right was less comfortable than I thought it would be. I woke up many times thinking it was daylight, only to realize we were passing by another train station. The trains have to slow down as they go through district stations so you end up dazing in and out of consciousness as you become one with the train.
The tombs were a mess. It was both sad and astonishing to see what kind of state the terracotta warriors were in.
Many of the warriors were still being reassembled painfully piece by piece. I spent a lot of time just trying to see how they could manage to recapture which piece would go where. I mean, they all look the same! What a nightmare.
Plastic wrap. China’s version of Canadian ducktape. sweet. ignore the sign plzokthxbibi.
Xi’an was both beautiful yet poor. A friend from Beijing described it to me best by saying that it was a city raped of its soul years after having its title taken away as the capital of China. Many of the buildings within the city walls were in poor condition and although there were notible improvements, building of subways and what not, it was very clear that overall the cityscape was very old. I actually found Xi’an quite charming in its own way, I’ve always preferred grungy over the superclean streets of say, Singapore.
Outside the city walls, it was fun walking around as the sunset. We were able to just catch the sunset as we climbed the walls to enjoy the lantern festival that we stumbled upon at the same day.
One of the less useable homes around the core neighbourhoods within the walls. I saw a man watching TV with a hole in his wall as if it was modern day air conditioning.
We walked all night from the east side of the wall all the way to the end at the west side. It took around 3 hours and we were tired only to realize that we’d have to walk all the way back to return to the hotel. Ugh. We decided to walk some of the less populated streets, darker corners of Xi’an just to see if we could find anything. I am not sure what we were looking for exactly, maybe partly trouble, but we ended upon a real treasure.
We saw a crowd gathered around a woman who seemed to be cooking. Her contraption was inventive. A bike held all her groceries, a paint can her oil, her stove consisted of a oil drum with coals and a old switch controlled fan. Every now and then she’d reach down to the fan to switch it on. It took me moments to realize that she was blowing oxygen into the oil drum to fire up the heat. It was brilliant and resourceful in an stone henge kind of way. Her husband noticed we were foreigners and offered us some of his own tea and acted like a store manager. He asked us where we were from and we conversed briefly with hand signals as food was brought to our table. The wife cook was a bigger woman. Years of cooking made her hands look like she could crush water out of solid rock. 6RMB a plate for spicy noodles and it was to die for.
We found calligraphy street. Isn’t this beautiful? Not gonna say much here.
The lovely lady cooking us our yummy noodles along with the incredible machine.
My beard monstrosity was growing in after only 4 days. Spicy noodles ftw!
A common attraction in Xi’an were the muslim communities visible within the city. Xi’an houses a number of mosques that were very charming. They consisted of large courtyards with multiple interconnecting buildings leading always to a giant prayer center at the end. Also within the communities were many stores and shops selling Muslim food. It was curious to me because I never knew that people in China followed this religion.
An example of the interlinking courtyards within one of the mosques.
The hats were a sure sign of the muslim community within Xian.
Charming fabrics found within the mosque.
Loved the colors in this photo. People used this table to get spices for their noodles which seemed very common within the muslim community, possibly because they are vegetarian?
These little steamed desserts were great. She cranked them out with the efficiency only a chinese woman could do.
We didn’t spend too much time in Xian, maybe 2 days. Because what lied next was Hua Shan. The most dangerous mountain trail in China and my sole purpose for the backpacking trip. I was so close now, I could taste it. I knew Hua would take us two days of hard work so we made sure we ate tons in Xi’an and rested well. I predicted the hike would take us about 6 hours each day so it was going to be a rough ride coming up, still I couldn’t wait for the hours to pass!
The drum tower in the distance. We were walking up from a Starbucks, coffee reminded me of home..
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