The early mornings on this trip started to add up.
At 4.45am the lights came on in our train carriage and the nice chinese lady came around and gave everyone who was getting off in Xian a tap on the shoulder. Thus beginning disoriented findings of clothes, shoes and luggage. On the top bunk I couldn’t sit up straight enough to be able to put my shoes on, but there was too much going on below to go down there and do it.
We had to walk a little bit away from the station to get to our minibus but after that it was a very short ride to the hotel, past the main landmark in the middle of Xian, the old Bell Tower. There is a drum tower as well, about 50m away. Until the Communists turned up in 1949, time was told by beating the drum at 5am and 7pm, and ringing the bell at 2 hour intervals in between.
But more of that later; the immediate problem being that because it was 6am most of the people whose rooms we were taking hadn’t even checked out yet. Or woken up. So we put all our baggage in an empty room and wandered back toward the bell tower, where someone had spotted a McDonalds out the bus window. They made a mistake with our change, which we didn’t discover until we sat down, what with the multitude of chinese notes you can be given. So our breakfast was almost free and I went back for pancakes.
Still there no rooms available so Lilian took us on the planned orientation walk, which went south from the bell tower to the old city walls, which are some of the oldest in China, east along a market street which was only just opening, where the same someone spotted a few food stalls and promptly wished we had come here for food instead, back north to the street our hotel is on, then back to the drum tower to wait around there.
Eventually some rooms became available (with double beds) so Mike and Joan (from Melbourne via Yorkshire) headed back first, followed by us after a quick look around the markets in the Islamic street near the drum tower. It was in these very markets that I bought an excellent Tintin t-shirt for 65 Yuan. It has a little Tintin face on the front and a ‘Blue Lotus’ picture on the back.
Then we went back to our room for a shower (which was heaven), and Alice had a nap while I picked and twiddled with some of our pictures, checked email, read through some old sports scores, etc. Bad news came from Wollongong where it appears my bicycle has been stolen. Maris says he’s going to keep the thick security cable which was cut through as a souvenir.
About 2pm we decided it might be a good idea to leave the hotel room, so we walked the same route as the morning down to the south gate. Only, being national holiday, it was considerably more crowded than this morning. Actually the whole town was kind of vibrating. And the smog was so bad it looked like it was raining in the distance. We were wondering what the travel advisory for that would be like:
‘We advise Australian citizens travelling in the area to postpone any non-essential breathing’.
In a side alley full of calligraphy stalls we found a lady making savoury pancakes and bought 2 for 4 yuan each. She puts the dollop of dough in the middle of the hot plate, spreads it around real thin with a tool that looks like a small rake, then cracks an egg on the top and throws on some chives and other herbs. She lets that cook for about 10 seconds. She loosens the whole pancake, then flips it over so that the egg side is down and the egg will cook. In the middle she spreads chilli sauce and plum sauce, piles up what we later thought must have been fried rice cakes, then folds the sides up, puts it in a bag and away you go.
We sat down on a bench once they were cool enough to eat and a Chinese girl came over and asked ‘ah excuse-ah me, where you buy this?’ We gave directions and she walked that way urgently.
Then we went looking for the rest of lunch and found the dumpling shop which Lilian had pointed out this morning. From out Intrepid guidebook we knew vegetable dumplings were ‘su jiao zi’ but the lady in there didn’t have those. She did however point us to someone down the other side of the street who did. So we walked along pointing in each shop until she nodded.
Once we could explain to the new shop lady what we wanted she asked some questions we didn’t understand and returned with a notepad on which she wrote ‘1 = 30 = 6’. So we ordered whatever that was and sat down to wait. Joy and tribulation! 1 serve is 30 dumplings. Which means it costs 6 yuan. On the way home we went past a man blowing giraffes, pigs and cats out of some kind of candy, which children lined up to buy. After making two ‘body’ lumps he would stretch the tail out, break it halfway, and then blow up the tail to inflate the body, deftly shaping it to whatever animal with the other hand as he did so. Everybody but one was walking around with a particular type of ice cream so we bought two of those for 2 yuan each – it was basically a bubble-o-bill without the gum bubbles and very tasty.
In Xian there is a very shiny shopping mall and we went up and down the nine stories trying to find some blank DVDs to back up our photos, and by the time we’d done that and squirmed back through the crowds it was 5.30 and nearly time for our group dinner. Nat from our previous group wanted to come too, but when we get to the hotel room I found out that the SMS I had sent saying that our group leader didn’t mind hadn’t arrived because I’d sent it to the wrong number, and her phone message said ‘Will be unavailable til 5th october’. So went down to the lobby to try and call her hostel from there but luckily she’d figured it out for herself, called our hotel and found our group leader that way, and then walked on over. We had a real nice, very filling dinner, bought some food at the massive Wal-Mart and then came back to our hotel room to help Nat by finishing a bottle of wine she had bought in Russia and didn’t want to carry home.
That’s just the kind of helpful people we are.
Greg
