Xi’an

Picking up from the ending of the Hua Shan post:

When I arrived at the bus station in Xi’an, I decided to try avoiding the taxi drivers waiting for tourists, so they can overcharge them. (As a new arrival in a strange city, you are at a disadvantage: you don’t know where you are, how far it is to the hotel you want, or how much to pay. Plus, the cab driver may ignore your hotel request and drive you to a different hotel that pays him a commission.)

The Lonely Planet book shows three bus stations on its map, and one is very close to the hotel I wanted. Maybe I would be lucky and the hotel would be one block away. I headed out of the bus station to the street, and started walking.

The streets in Chinese cities have the street names in English at the intersections. I saw that I was at none of the three bus stations, but I did identify a road from the guidebook’s map.

Motorcycles drivers sit around at street corners waiting for people to pay them for delivery errands. I approached a driver with the map, and eventually learned that my hotel was 5 gongli (kilometers, not Gong Li, the actress (it’s all in the tones)) along the road.

Okay, there should be a city bus that runs along the road.

The city bus stops have posted schedules and stops, but only in Chinese characters. I headed to the bus stop, and looked for someone to ask which bus I needed. After a couple of tries, one of those crazy “travelling in China” things happened: I ran into a student who goes by the English name “Betty”.

She told me that she is taking the same bus, and can help me. She will tell me when to exit the bus. When the time comes, she gets off the bus too, and offers to help me find the hotel (although she turns out to be a terrible map-reader, and I do most of the hotel-finding work).

After I check in, I offer to buy lunch for both of us, to repay her for helping me. After lunch she offers to show me around the sights, next day. So we arrange to meet in the morning.

Betty is not actually from Xi’an. She is from Sichuan Province, near Chengdu. She has only been in Xi’an for one year. So, while she knows about Xi’an, she is not a knowledgeable guide. She can, however, navigate the city bus system (some of the sights are too far to walk to), and speak Chinese (although she cannot understand the Xi’an dialect very well – it is very different from the Chengdu dialect).

In fact, she has never been into most of the sights, because she did not want to pay the admission fees.

Anyway, we visited the Big Wild Goose Pagoda (home to Buddhist scrolls), Bell Tower, Drum Tower, Muslim Quarter, 400-year-old house (which includes a tea ceremony and shadow puppet play), and ended the day playing eight-ball outside the East Gate of the City Wall (we were equally bad players – I won both games, but only by luck).

On my second full day, I arranged with my hotel for a tour of the Terracotta Warriors and other sites outside of the city.

However, tomorrow, I will go with Betty to the Shaanxi Museum (which French PM Chirac visited last week) and the City Wall, before I head for the train station for a 7:30pm overnight train to Beijing.