Saturday was the day of my big trip to Xi’an. The scary thing was I beat my alarm awake even though I had to wake up around 6:00 to make it to the airport on time. Since I was not going to be there very long I was able to just bring one small bag. At the airport I finally flew out of concourse 1 but took the taxi into concourse 2. As I was walking in between the concourses I had my ticket out and was looking at it to try and divine how one determined which concourse to go to when someone grabbed my ticket out of my hand and began running down the walkway yelling at me to follow him because I was so late. I started chasing the guy to get my ticket back and he started yelling for my passport. It was like a Marx brother’s movie, give me my ticket, give me your passport. Finally he stopped at the ticket counter and turned around handing me the ticket. As he handed it to me he said give me some money. I just started laughing asking him what I was paying him for, running and yelling at me? After a couple tries he wandered back to the walkway to spring this fun trick on another unsuspecting person.

The rest of the trip was uneventful and after I got in I went right to the hotel and checked in. In my room there was a great view of the main square in Xi’an. I looked on the map to try to determine where I needed to walk and realized that the three main things you can see in the center of the town were visible from my window. This helped drive home how much smaller Xi’an was than Beijing. Or at least set that somewhat false assumption.



I headed out to the main square and went over to the Muslim quarter and started wandering around there. It was really interesting seeing this section of the town. It was a lot like the Hutongs in Beijing but everyone had their head covered. There were no full robes though, just head coverings. There were quite a few restaurants as well that served noodles, these pie things and lamb skewers. It was a really vibrant area. The one drawback to the restaurants though was the lack of beer. I was looking for a place that had beer until I remembered that alcohol was not on the good list for Islam.







I wandered around for a while then ended up eating some lunch at a place on the street. One thing was that Xi’an is a lot less western than Beijing. This made it a lot more interesting in walking around but it also meant that people were a lot more interested in every move I made. The place I ate lunch at was right on the street and I had many people stop and take pictures of me eating. The food was really spicy but also really good. After I finished I bought a dessert from the woman selling these rice things near the cow.







After that I ended up at the great mosque which was the first time I have been to a mosque in my life. What made this more fascinating than some of the temples around here is that it was still being used as a religious center. While I was wandering around there was a service going on. It reminded me of churches back in the States. Everyone came in and said hello to one another taking time to catch up then after service saying their goodbyes. There were quite a few places that were off limits to tourists but open to people attending services.





After the great mosque I wandered over to the drum tower. It was a building that had a bunch of drums surrounding the center area which you could bang on. After walking almost the entire way around I wandered inside and saw a drum performance by a group that was pretty cool. It was also the beginning of a re-occurring theme in Xi’an (drums).



I then went into the square to sit down and people watch for a while. While there I was approached by a gaggle of thirteen year old girls who wanted their picture taken with me. After they got that though they went and flagged down an old white woman to take a picture with her. I felt so cheap.


After this I walked back to the hotel and passed out for 30 minutes as I was exhausted. Waking up, I debated just sleeping the rest of the day but finally forced myself back out onto the street. I tried to get into the bell tower but could not find the correct underground tunnel to get there so just decided to head south to the city wall.

Xi’an is one of the few remaining cities in China that has a retained a complete city wall. It is one of their main tourist draws now and rightfully so. It is really cool looking it just screws up traffic in the worst way if you are trying to get from inside to outside the wall or the reverse. So I walked around the southern gate some and decided to walk down to the great pagoda and the little pagoda. After my early experience I thought that Xi’an was all walkable. I proved to be mostly wrong.

I walked to the little pagoda first. It was far, like 4 kilometers far. On the way I saw lots of cool stuff like a park and the remnants of a street vendor who had been arrested (or so I assume). I saw a guy run up to another vendor and say something and they both picked up all their things and took off running the other direction. I kept walking and there were a bunch of people surrounding a random mess of things on the ground.







Anyway the pagoda, it was a temple created for a monk who had gathered a bunch of writings from India and come back to teach about his findings. The pagoda itself was nice but the rest of the park was ok. It was being torn up to be replaced with a lot of really new stuff that just did not fit with the rest of the buildings. One cool thing was there was a drum group practicing there. It was an all female group and a small audience had gathered to watch. The director was an excitable man. He kept stopping the group to exhort them to greater feats of energy, like running across the lawn while banging their cymbals and finishing by sliding on their knees in the grass. Needless to say it only really looked right when he did it because none of the performers had quite the same zest for theatrics as he did.





After the little pagoda I decided to walk down to the greater pagoda. This turned out to be about another 6 km and took about forever. On the way I decided to stop in a square and grab some food that seemed pretty popular. There was a little place selling octopus on a stick for one quai. It was great. I then continued the four hour walk to the greater pagoda stopping to see the sunset.



The greater pagoda was actually shorter than the little pagoda but the square was a lot larger and more fun. There were a bunch of ponds and tons of people out. One of the things I really liked about Xi’an was how many people there were out and about. I think it comes from the same area that likes the cacophony of spring festival and the continuous fireworks. The square for the greater pagoda seemed to be a very popular place for people to hang out. I spent a half an hour just sitting there and people watching. The only thing that made me get up was a woman who came over to practice her English with me but after asking two questions just sat there waiting for me to ask her to dinner. I did not ask her and ended up walking around the rest of the square.

There were some food stalls with a lot of interesting food. Like spiders on a stick and a box full of live scorpions you could order. I am glad that it was not just me that found this crazy. The stall was surrounded by Chinese people daring one another to eat these things.





After walking around here for a while I decided to walk back to this theater where I had decided to see the Tang dynasty song and dance troop. The travel agent tried to convince me to go and I refused but after dropping off my stuff decided that it would be something to do besides I could just grab dinner afterwards. So I walked back to this theater.

The theater was fun. There was a lot of costumes and dancing. The Tang dynasty is considered by many to be the height of Chinese culture. Supposedly the Japanese empire based itself on a wholesale re-appropriation of the Tang dynasty culture. The dances where quite entertaining but there was one part that dragged. There is an instrument called the piaxiao and a master who was playing this instrument for a good 20 minutes. It was supposed to sound like an oriole and to his credit it did sound like a bird but this particular bird had been fed cocaine and meth and was on the border of his heart exploding. Too many trills and really high notes in rapid succession.

After the theater I decided to be masochistic and walk back to the hotel instead of taking a cab. All around the worst decision I could make. Not only do I still have blisters on my feet but I got back to the Muslim quarter just after all the restaurants I had picked as good dinner candidates had closed. I ended up eating dinner at KFC instead of a tasty lamb dinner. I was not a happy camper. I did end up getting a foot massage though at the hotel which improved my spirits some.

Overall I had a really great day though. It had been a stressful week at work and it was nice to get out of Beijing and be able to see lots of really cool areas with people just enjoying being outside with one another. The weather was nice and warm without being oppressive. Also Xi’an has a lot of trees and flowers which make you forget that the air quality is pretty much as bad as Beijing. Hell look at these pictures and you can barely see any buildings in the distance.