My Funny Valentine . . .

I wish!!! Just that it being Valentine's Day it seemed the appropriate choice to continue my lame "theme" of heading up some of my posts with song titles!

Anyway, I commented recently that I was onto the lower tier of places to visit in Xi'an. It seems I was wrong. Laura must have been saving one of the best for last. We went to visit the mauseleum of one of the Han Emperors - Jingdi I think his name was. I'll have to go back and check all the Chinese names that I've been writing. The Han dynasty was from around 220BC to about 200AD; I'm not sure of the dates, but comparable with the height of the Roman Republic and Early Empire. They traded silk with Rome and I think that's when Xi'an (then Chang an) assumed its position as the start of the silk route. It was a great trip. The whole museum is under the tomb. The Han built huge artificial hills over their tombs so they're easy to find (and most have been robbed over the centuries) but there was lots to look at in this display. They did the same sort of thing that Qin Shi Huang did but at about 1/3 scale, so there are thousands of miniature statues of people and animals. The people's bodies are terracotta but the arms were wood and they were dressed in silk, so the only thing left of most of them is the naked bodies. I had to chuckle when I noticed that the looks on the eunuchs' faces were definitely sad compared to the others!!!

Much of the museum is glass floored so you're walking over above the actual trenches where the excavations have taken place. There was also a good audiovisual display explaining some of the significant points, with a headset giving an English translation of much of it. All in all, very cool.

Today I finally fulfilled my ambition of walking right around the city wall. I got up on the South Gate (Nan Men) and walked along anticlockwise, so South to East to North to West, then back along the South wall to finish. It took about 4 hours to walk the 13.8km so I've walked about 8 hours today! Good though. It was interesting to see the different character of the inner city in each direction. The south seems much more upmarket, with swish bars and tourist focused areas. The buildings there are often modern but in traditional style. The East and North seem to be undergoing a lot of urban renewal, but I think the whole of the inner part (inside the wall) is pretty desirable real estate. I took lots of pictures along the way to try to capture the feel of the place.

Last night we went to a bath house. It was an experience like nothing I've ever had before. I don't think I've ever been naked in front of so many people! Still, it was great getting a massage and doing the whole steam and sauna thing. Later I got slaughtered in Ma Jong, as I expected, since the Chinese game is very different to the way it's played in the West, and I couldn't read any Chinese numbers above 4. I can now! Needless to say, I was not the fastest player at the table. Laura's mother was the most skilled but Laura was perhaps the luckiest, coming out the clear winner. I was a poor 4th in a field of 4!

This might be my last post (maybe one more) because I fly home on Monday. It'll be sad leaving because I've really enjoyed my time in Xi'an and in China generally.

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.

Blue skies smiling at me . . .

Nothing but blue skies do I see, for the first time since leaving Beijing 10 days ago. The cloud has been so low that it was reduced visibility to only a couple of hundred meters at best. But today, the sun is shining and the weather is sweet, as Robert Nestor Marley put it. And I'm off to Huashan at last. This is the trip that was postponed at the last minute because of my getting sick. Actually it couldn't have worked out better because it meant I could see the mountain in all its glory, instead of a sea of cloud. Huashan means Flower Mountain. There are five “must see” mountains in China and this is the most western one. You're supposed to see them all during your lifetime, although there is an escapre clause. There's one in Anhui province, wher Laura's father is from, which apparently has all the features of the five and if you see that one you don't need to see the others. Having seen that one, Laura is using it as a lame excuse not to visit the others. That wasn't about to stop me though so the bus arrived and off I went in it.

I was promptly approached by a highschool student who offered to be my translator for the trip, which was good and bad. Good becase he was able to interpret the menu at the ‘restaurant’ – more like a diner really, or perhaps like the kind of communal dining areas they used to have in Maoist times. I paid my money and got a receipt, then went up to a counter and was served from a baine marie (sp?). Actually if that is how people ate before Comrade Deng got his hands on the levers of power, I don't know what the problem was! I had the cheapest thing on the menu and it was rice and four different accompaniments. And quite yummy. After that, immediately preceded by a sales ppitchj about various Chinese medicinal herbs, complete with a doctor who'd look at your fingernails and prescribe for your ills, it was off to the mountain. It's quite a sight. It's not that tall really; more like Banks Peninsula but comprised of sheer cliffs and deep gullies. Of course having been inhabited for thousands of years, it's also comprised of religious sites for the Daoist or Buddhist communities and the whole route is a constructed walkway with guard rails and stairs. So much for the danger I was warned to be careful of. However when it had rained in Xi'an it had snowed on Huashan so some of the steps and shaded bits of path were quite icy so a bit of care was required.

The downside of sticking with the student and his parents was that they were really slow, due mainly to undue caution – they kept warning me to be careful at the slightest opportunity. It meant I was only able to climb the first of the five peaks and get most of thew way tro the second before they decided it was time to return. On my own, I would have made it up to the top of the second (and highest) peak because I would have travelled quicker and not returned so early. Overall though, I think it was probably OK to do what I did. If I ever return to China, I'd like to go back to Huashan and spend a few days there climbing all five peaks. And maybe go to the other “must see” mountains as well.

The biggest disappointment for me has been the whole New Year thing. I'm not a big one for festivals. Since I got over the whole anticipation of Christmas presents thing, it's been a nice day, exchanging gifts with the family and getting together for a meal, but that's it. I could never get excited about the Muslim festivals either. I think I thought that it would be different in China. Chinese students, people who talk about China, and everything you see about the place, go on about China's festivals, one of the biggest being New Year. I expected big street parades with those long dragon things and fireworks displays to put anything in New Zealand to shame. Actually, I found nothing of the sort. There were people lighting fireworks on the street and that was about it. Laura said people are either at restaurants with their family or at home watching the New Year variety show on TV. It all wraps up with the first full moon of the new year heralding the beginning of spring. I got back from Huashan at 8.15pm and the fireworks were all over. I sat at home with nothing to do. It was all a bit weird. I think I'd had this idea that in China things would be different. I'd get caught up in a collective excitement and actually enjoy a festival. Maybe it says more about me than about China. I did comment to Laura though about how I didn't really have a sense that Xi'an is 20 times bigger than Christchurch (8 million people) and she said “Oh, you would have if you'd been on East Street last night for the end of the new year celebration!” Hmmm. I would have liked to have known that before rather than after the event.

Yesterday I decided to go and see Xi'an's Lama Temple. I decided I'd take a photo of the Lamas in their funny hats. Sadly there were no funny hats to be seen, but I did wander around the place. These Buddhists remind me of mediaeval Catholics – there's always some dodgy miracle on display. So here, where Cixi (the Qing Dowager Empress) reputedly poked her hair pins into a tree to hang her hat and coat, the tree now miraculously has holes all over it. Occam's razor would say it's more likely someone put holes in the tree. Kind of like the giant “footprints”, complete with Buddhist engravings in the Big Wild Goose Pagoda. Do people actually believe this stuff or is it just part of a collective myth people like to hold onto?

Take Me Home Country Road

I headed out to the countryside to visit another of Laura's father's friends; that guy really does have a lot of friends! It's the first time I've really managed to get more than just a passing glimpse of the countryside from a vehicle window, so I was pretty interested to see what I would find. The standard view is that China's modernisation has left the countryside behind and that conditions there are much poorer than in the cities. That’s certainly what I observed. Get off the main roads and you’re pretty quickly onto dirt tracks and (after one day of rain – mud). The houses are much more basic and designed in the traditional way. That does involve some quite ingenious design features mind you – like heat being piped from the kitchen wood stove through to the space under the bed. The bed itself is on a base of brick and tiles and it’s the cavity underneath that's heated. The place I visited had a separate fire to do this but backing the kitchen space onto the bedroom area is a common practice. Where we sat to eat lunch was heated by a tiny coal fire in a pipe attached to a pipe chimney venting outside into the courtyard. Hot water was produced through a tank welded to the side of the fire box.

The people we visited are Christians so we trotted down to have a look at their church, an optimistically huge construction built a few hundred years ago when the missionaries presumably believed it would only be a matter of (a short) time before they had converted China. Of course, as we know, it was not to be, so there's this huge church in this small village . . .

When we got back it was off to dinner with another of Laura’s father's friends at a Hui (Muslim) restaurant. I can't complain about the food! I was feeling uncomfortable though about the fact that I keep being hosted at – often quite expensive – restaurants but never get to contribute. On the other hand, I couldn't afford to go if I had to pay. I raised my concerns over this with Laura and she insisted that it is the Chinese custom that the host pays for everything – no one else pays anything. As a visitor I'm not expected to contribute anything; it's an honour for them to have a foreign visitor there. It feels strange and I still feel a little uncomfortable about it but that's how it is. I suppose if her parents ever come to New Zealand I can shout them to a nice restaurant – I'll have to start saving as soon as I get home!