Friday morning in Xi’an; the smog had become quite comical, we had been to the Terracotta Warriors, and the last thing left was to have a look at the old city wall.
Apparently you can rent a bicycle and ride around the top of the wall; this takes around an hour and a half and costs 20 yuan. First came breakfast and on the way into the very same Yum Cha place we had gone to last night we were not surprised to see Kate, Sat, Adam and Andy coming back from breakfast. They had to go back to the hotel and check out so we made plans to meet at the South gate at around midday. We changed some traveller’s cheques on the way, bought our tickets and attempted to take pictures of buildings through the smog.
The old city wall is huge. It’s about 18 metres high and 15 metres wide at the base, and something like 7 metres wide at the top. You go up the stairs at the back, and then you go looking for a place to rent some bicycles. During Golden Week, around lunchtime, you’re unlikely to find one. So we walked West and arrived at the West pillar without having found a bicycle, formulating plans to knock some other people off their tandems and ride away at maximum speed. At the West Gate (halfway along the Western side of the wall, walking north) we bought ice cream and resolved to walk back to the South Gate for lunch and souvenir shopping.
Lunch was exactly what we had on Wednesday – fried eggy pancakes from the same lady who has happy we’d bought our friends back with us, and absurdly cheap dumplings. Meanwhile Alice went looking, successfully, for a small silk mobile of various animals, which Lilian had advised her not to pay more than 20 yuan for. So she gave me the rest of her money and went and bargained with the shop owner having only a twenty note in her wallet. On that same street corner we came across the candy blowing man I had been telling everyone about so Adam bought a rooster which no one could actually bring themselves to eat. We were looking around for a small child to give it to but in the process of sitting down for and getting up after lunch it got broken.
(sigh)
On the way back to the hotel we went past the vast Walmart again and bought some various train food for the overnight trip to Shanghai. While I was inside (as we had too many bags and there were literally no spare lockers to put them in) Alice had an extended ‘conversation’ with an old Chinese lady who either didn’t realise she wasn’t speaking Chinese in return or didn’t care.
We’d put all our bags in one hotel room for the day after checking out, then moved all the bags down to the lobby and crowded the place up, and after that we got another bus and found a space in the train station to pile all our bags on the floor and crowd the place up. Unbelievably the train station in Xi’an offered free wireless internet so we went right ahead and posted some more travel journals. There’s not much to tell about the train trip; the funniest thing was waiting to see who would step in to carry Lilian’s heavy roller suitcase up the steps for her. Why she bought that instead of a backpack, I will never know.
Greg
