More places to visit

Yesterday I went to see the Qin palace. Actually, given that the Qin palace was mainly made of wood and built about 2200 years ago, there's nothing of it left but they've built this replacement. It's a bit run down and dilapidated and it isn't really on the tourist trail the way the terracotta warriors are, so it's a strange place. I felt that they weren't sure whether it should be a museum, a theme park or an amusement park, so it's sort of a bit of each. They've built this whole palace structure that you can walk around and there are areas which have held exhibits of real artifacts in the past, but if you go upstairs there are picnic tables and plastic chairs on the long covered walkway. I can't imagine Qin Shi Huang having been too keen on that. Up into the tower and there's this woman giving you the option to get dressed up for a photo in Qin imperial regalia. There was a middle aged woman there dressed up as an empress with her (I presume) husband taking photos and I have to admit it looked pretty impressive from where I was. Out the back there's an artificial lake with an island, complete with an ancient style pavilion. But on the lake are these tacky fibreglass 'dragon boats' in gaudy colours to take people for wee excursions and a heap of peddleboats for hire, like you'd see at the Groynes. Oh, and these crazy mirrors like you'd get at a funfair! There were quite a few informative boards with aspects of the history of the Qin dynasty, which actually didn't last very long; they were a pretty cruel and unpopular bunch of rulers, and a bunch of fibreglass replicas of Qin warriors standing in alcoves, looking a bit the worse for wear.

The place was virtually deserted so it was weird when I heard this voice floating in the ether, in English. I looked around but couldn't see anyone. Later as I was leaving, I heard the same voice and looked up to see a Chinese guy and another guy who looked like a PI. Sure enough, he was from Sigatoka, in Fiji! He's in China for 5 years on a Chinese government scholarship studying agriculture. As an undergrad, he had to do a 6 month course in Chinese because all his lessons are in Chinese. After 2 years, he reckons he can understand stuff pretty well but still can't speak much.

Last night Laura and I went into town - to the Muslim quarter (where I must have eaten the thing that made me sick the other day) to meet her friend Helen, whom I'd met a couple of times in Christchurch. They toured me round the various eateries in the area - it's "the" place to go and get snacks and stuff and also it's where Helen (who's of Hui nationality, so Muslim) lives. It was great, even though there was too much food... After that we wandered around some of the market areas looking at stuff.

Today it was off to Banpo, where there's a 6000 year old village site that's been excavated. It was a bit of a mission to get there. Laura gives me these bits of paper with instructions on what bus to catch and to which stop, with the stop written in Chinese script and in pinyin with the tones added. It's great, because I can attempt to give the name of the stop myself and wave the bit of paper at the conductor if I can't make myself understood. It's been really successful up to now. Today was a bit more complicated because I needed to transfer twice, so a total of three busses to get there. It turned out that the third bus didn't actually leave from the place where the second stopped, so I had various people pointing me in contrdictory directions. The stop was in a really poor working class district where English speaking people are as rare as hens' teeth so I was getting nowhere fast, when this guy walked up, said Hello, and put me in a motorcycle rickshaw, paid the driver to take me to the stop, and walked off before I could repay him the money! The rickshaw guy then jumped out at the end and made sure the bus conductor knew where I was going. Sometimes people are just so nice.

I made it to the museum, which has a brand new building covering the site, and various things that have been excavated on display, including some awesome (considering it's 6000 year old neolithic) pottery and a bunch of remarkably error free English labels. There are also a whole bunch of skeletons of people there, still half buried - or possibly re-half buried - for people to look at. It's not a bad display all told, with computers running little graphical representations of how the huts were built etc although they were funny too. The narrator (presumably one of the archaeologists) sounded German, so the English errors are German errors instead of Chinese ones. Then out the back, there's this "reconstructed village" you can visit. It hasn't been maintained for years; overtaken by the new display I suppose, but never closed, and these sorts of things (thatched roofs etc) have to be maintained or they look pretty sad pretty quickly. But weirder still, if you look inside the huts, they are being used to store all kinds of stuff, like old building materials, windows etc.

They had a side display of "farmers' art", a movement that began in the 50s in the Xi'an area, and got a huge boost during the cultural revolution when educated people went out into the countryside to teach literacy etc. It's a kind of bright coloured folk art, with scenes of rural life in a kind of caricature style. Some of it was pretty cool, other stuff less so. I talked to the guy there and it was interesting to hear him saying something positive about the cultural revolution. I suppose that is what it was supposed to be. It got out of control for a whole bunch of reasons but had some good objectives too.

So another couple of full days, although I definitely get the feeling that I'm onto about the third tier of exhibits now. Still, with only 4 days until I leave, that's not too bad, and bits of Banpo definitely wouldn't fit that disparaging description.

I've got a few things still left to do - including buying a few deferred birthday presents, although that's proving harder than I thought - and walking around the wall; I still haven't done that. So I don't see myself sitting around with nothing to do in my last few days.