Adventures in Asia: Xi'an, China

I am still fighting off the cross-date line jet lag, so last night around 20:00 I went out for a walk in an effort to stay awake. I went down to see Xi'an's Bell Tower.  I had low expectations, but they really know how to light up a historic landmark!

Given the Bell Tower's beauty, I figured I would move a little further and check out the Drum Tower.  Really it is difficult for me to tell the difference, but it is also lit up spectactularly.  Who needs Christmas when you have Xi'an's Bell and Drum towers?

The Drum Tower led me into the Muslim Quarter, and it proved the most memorable part of the night!

There was so much bustle, it felt like a carnival.  Countless fascinating food options, and all sorts of other things for sale, as well.  I limited myself to a fresh pomegranate juice, but only by promising myself that I would come back today.

Which, I did.

I began my enjoyment of all the Muslim quarter had to offer with a bbq squid on a stick.  

Next, I tried some jackfuit, and then took a break from eating to tour the Great Mosque.

In some ways the Great Mosque is a bit boring, except that it is a mosque that could fool you for Buddhist temple!

Seriously, do these turtles strike you as Muslim?

This is the minaret!

In some places you can identify some Arabic, and in one spot is a chalk board with prayer times listed, so if you look for the clues you can figure out that it is Muslim; but really I am sure if I had just wandered in I would have assumed it was Buddhist.  This is the prayer hall (which non-Muslims cannot enter):

After the mosque I went back to eating.  This was a dish of the Xi'an famous cold noodles with sesame sauce.  Yum!

And then it was back to the street for some dumplings.

I was stuffed now, so had to quit eating sadly.

Something that almost all Xi'an cuisine seems to have is chili peppers, and look at this!

From the Muslim quarter, I went to the closest metro station.  By the way, here is what the Bell Tower looks like in the day time.

I rode the metro for the first time (state-of-the-art, not surprisingly) to the Great Wild Goose Pagoda.

This pagoda dates to 652, although then it was only five stories and now it is seven.

The pagoda is in the middle of a large temple complex, which has many beautiful buildings and gardens and water features and so on.  I walked through some of it, but mainly I was interested in climbing the pagoda.  Here were the views from the four windows at the top:

After the pagoda, I rode the metro back to my hostel.  I noticed this presumably Communist Party propaganda in the metro station and realized how rare it has been to see propaganda in China, especially in comparison to North Korea, where it was ubiquitous; even this rather subtle flag stood out to me.

I ate dinner from a place where the food was already prepared and behind glass and I simply pointed at what I wanted and the lady scooped it onto a plate for me.  Then she took a big bowl of rice and dumped it on top.  The food was delicious, and the lady was so happy to be serving me that it made it taste even better.  By pointing I asked for a beer, and she gave me a bottle along with a plastic bowl to drink from.  Not exactly what I would consider a prime way to enjoy a beer, but it was a fun experience anyway.  The whole meal (plate of food + rice + beer) cost me 15 yuan, or about $3 CAD!

After dinner, I headed back again to the Muslim quarter to try something I had not had any room left in my stomach to try earlier: what is basically a fresh fruit buffet.  They give you a disposable bowl and reusable tongs and you go down the row picking out fruit you want.  Other than mango, grapefruit, and kiwi, I do not know the names of the fruits I chose!

Once you have your bowl full of whatever you want, they chop it up for you, and then charge by weight.

My bowl came to 33 yuan, or close to $7 CAD, so not cheap, especially by Xi'an standards, but what a delicious bowl of exotic fresh fruit, and the novelty for me was so worth it!  

Adventures in Asia: Xi'an, China

On Friday morning I left Edmonton via YVR and PEK to Xi'an, China!  Between fairly long flight time, a six hour layover in Beijing, and, of course, crossing the date line, it was late Saturday night when I arrived.

I had booked my hostel without understanding how cool it is.  Hosteling International ranks it as one of its top ten most unique hostels, because it is an old residential complex (apparently this site has been such since the 7th century!) which also served as a Red Army liaison office.  Basically it is a collection of single story buildings, all facing inward with a wall surrounding it, so there are multiple courtyards and it becomes a bit of a maze.

Yesterday, Sunday, I visited the Xi'an city walls, the north gate of which is a short walk from my hostel.

The walls are fully restored (so I am not sure how much is actually old), but date back a thousand years.  The coolest thing about the walls is that they are basically an enormous bike lane!  Well, a tourist bike lane, since no one would actually ride them to get anywhere.  One lap of the rectangle is just under 14 kilometres, so it's a distance pretty much made for cycling.  There must be thousands of bikes on the top of the wall for rent, and on Sunday at least a thousand must have been being ridden.

There were also stretches, however, where it was quite quiet.

I enjoyed myself so much I decided to do two laps (you rent the bike for 45 yuan (~$9 CAD) for three hours, and the two laps took me just over two hours to complete).  There are various buildings on the wall itself (such as guardhouses and archer towers), but the neat thing about cycling the rectangle is getting to see contemporary Xi'an on either side of the walls as well.  Here were some of my sights:

After the wall I stopped for a meal at a restaurant on the way back to my hostel.  It was a fairly nice restaurant, and from my times in Beijing and Shanghai I would have expected them to have a menu for English tourists (if not in English, then with pictures).  But, no we communicated with hand signals, and this is what I ended up with:

It was very good, but I remain unsure of what the little bowl was for.  It was full of a hot liquid, which could have been just hot water, but seemed to have something more in it.  It was given to me right away, and I think it was to drink (maybe some kind of tea?), but I also thought it could be for my hands.  I left it untouched. 

This afternoon I ate a meal that I was more confident of.  Xi'an is famous for a lamb soup with ripped up pita bread, and I had the name of it on my phone, so could pick it out of the menu.  

You can see just peaking out of the top left behind the bowl is a small dish of pickled garlic.  Almost every restaurant I have been in has had either raw cloves of garlic or pickled, like this one.  The pickled garlic was delicious and I polished it off (the soup was good too).

After lunch I caught a bus from the train station out to see the terracotta warriors (this, of course, is the main reason tourists come to Xi'an, although cycling those city walls might be what I remember even more).

The terracotta warriors are a little ways east of Xi'an, and we passed through a place called Lintong on our way there. 

As a young teenage stamp collector I bought a little booklet of United Nations stamps that celebrated the terracotta warriors; in 2010 I got to see the traveling exhibit in Montreal; in 2016 I had planned to come to Xi'an by train from Shanghai to see them, but it never worked out; but now, here I was, seeing them in person!

There are three excavated pits that you can tour, with by far the largest being pit 1.

The size of pit 1 is pretty much impossible to understand without seeing it in person.  It is a long walk all the way around, and I got the impression few people do it.

Something neither the UN stamps nor the Montreal exhibition prepared me for is how few of the thousands of statues are actually intact.  Since the intact ones are the ones you see photographed, I was not prepared for all the pieces.  But something about visiting in person that was cool was being able to see archaeologists literally trying to piece statues together in real time.

Pit 2 is also far larger than I would have expected, albeit much smaller than pit 1.  I am flabbergasted that anyone at any point in history felt this investment of time, energy, and resources was worthwhile, let alone that this was done 2300 years ago!

Something I had forgotten was that originally all the statues were brilliantly painted.  Apparently most of this paint disappeared within seconds of exposure to air.  This statue retained some paint, and also look at the detailed work on the sole of the shoe!

Pit 3 is the smallest of the three, and also the most elite, because this was the officer's pit.

Outside of the terracotta warriors site is a large commercial plaza, with all sorts of activity.  I bought some lamb skewers on my way back to the bus.

Back in Xi'an, I walked through this beautiful local park.

You cannot see it, but just to the left of this picture, a man is taking water on a large brush and drawing Chinese characters on the paving stones.  You can see some men watching him.  I have seen a lot of Buddhist rituals, but this is one I do not think I had seen before.

There was also a part of the park where a boombox was playing music and people (mostly elderly couples) were dancing.  It was very serene and beautiful, so I did not want to photograph it.  I did sit and watch for awhile though.

I carried on towards my hostel and stopped for dinner at what is basically a quick service restaurant.  Here I ate two more Xi'an cuisine specialties: lamb "hamburgers" and cucumber salad.