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.
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment