party of polaroid friends

All right, I'm going to do this before it all falls out of my head (as these things are wont to do), AND I'm even being smart and writing it out in Text Edit before I put onto Travellerspoint - somehow, every single time I manage to write out a big long involved post about something, TP stops saving it after I've been at it for maybe twenty minutes, and then it stalls my computer an hour after that. Last time it took me two hours to talk down Firefox from its ledge and salvage my entry, and that isn't even an overstatement!

So, let's start with the beginning, shall we?

THE BELL & DRUM TOWER TOUR

One of my good friends here, Ardan (who features in many party photos and was known to me, before I knew his name, as "the German looking for a party"), recently left Xi'an, and so this tour of the Bell and Drum Towers was to officially complete his sight-seeing tour of Xi'an, and clamber around the most prominent image of the city of Xi'an (the Bell Tower) and it's lesser-known cousin (the Drum Tower). To tell the truth, this wasn't anything very interesting. I have been to both before (I wonder if there's anywhere in Xi'an I won't go for the second time), and they are really both excuses to charge Y20 entrance fee and have a look around at the city from a different (and, admittedly, better) vantage point. They're nice buildings, old dynasty-style stuff, and they have moved some interesting artifacts into the buildings from the museum; when I went there five years ago they were just empty halls, as they must have once been, but they now house performance areas and are jam-packed with your average Chinese artifacts and relics.

The great part about this trip was, of course, the company. I went with Ardan, and the other German I know who isn't studying Chinese, Andreas. We had a good lunch before we left, at the street across from the South gate of the university, some delicious noodle soup, and we discussed Germany for a while. I had no idea, before talking to them, that Andreas was born in East Germany and Ardan in West Germany, so when I innocently asked the question about the Berlin Wall coming down, I didn't really expect a rather balanced debate. It didn't get nasty, of course, they're both level-headed guys and took the whole thing philosophically, but it was interesting to hear all about the different perceptions of the unification. We then, later, discussed 9/11 and the aftermath of all that, and it was interesting that we talked about the stories of Where We Were When... for the World Trade Center bombings, but not for the demolition of the Berlin Wall (which they both must remember; Ardan was 10, and Andreas was 9 at the time).

We also saw lots of the Christmas decorations and promotions that were going on around the city. There are two major shopping centers in the middle of the city - Ginwa (expensive), and Kaiyuan (still expensive by Chinese standards, but not as high-profile/designer as Ginwa) - and they both had huge Christmas trees on display at their centers. Most places here in Xi'an also have decorated up their windows, and put their staff in Santa hats, but it all still feels different. Not as serious, I suppose. Which is strange, because for the most part I don't really enjoy the earnestness that some people seem to have about Christmas - the seriousness of the religious holiday or the activist mentality railing against consumerism, or even the increased charity awareness - I just like my Christmas to be fun, silly, and full of happiness. But Christmas here in China seems to be just about decorating things for the sake of it. Another cultural cross-dressing that... you know, it looks okay from the outside, but when you look closer, there's something not quite right about it.

ARDAN'S FAREWELL PARTY

About a month ago, I introduced Ardan to a Korean restaurant just outside of the university's South-east gate. Before then, he had mainly been eating at the university cafeteria which, while it isn't terrible food, isn't the best around, either. After taking him there for the first time, he said he dreamed about it and often waxed poetic about the food, especially the sushi, even when we weren't there. So it was fitting that we started off our farewell celebrations at the Korean place. Attending dinner was Ardan, Niki, Sarah, Luca, Andreas, Malcolm, and myself, and we were probably the largest party to go to the Korean place since we took Sam there. It was loads of fun, Andreas and I kept a whole plate of pork chop to ourselves, we teased each other, and took photos on Ardan's camera with his little tripod. Mum also texted during the meal, once or twice and finally to say goodnight and she hoped that Ardan had a safe flight home. Andreas pointed out that it was possibly the most international message you could ever get: here he was, in a Korean restaurant in China, getting a text message from Australia wishing him a good flight home to Germany.

From the Korean restaurant we lost Niki (she was tired and needed to sleep after her weekend of teaching), but she pointed us in the direction of a bowling hall. The VERY general direction of a bowling hall, and the taxis we took had no clue, we had no clue, and the whole escapade resulted in us walking around very confused, Andreas asking random people where the bowling hall was (once he asked a girl our age, but her boyfriend snatched her away before she could answer, looking very angry. Andreas isn't that scary!), and we had almost given up hope and gone to a karaoke bar when the guard downstairs at the KTV told us where to go. We finally found the place, put our bowling shoes on, and played two games! We were split up into two teams on two lanes: me, Malcolm, and Andreas; and Ardan, Sarah, and Luca. On the second round we gave ourselves funny names - I was Miss Marple, Malcolm was Hercules Poirot, and Andreas was Sherlock Holmes. The lanes were a bit screwy though, and kept stealing balls or knocking over pins or turning off altogether, and at the end of our second set, the lane I was playing on didn't wait for play, but just kept resetting as though the player hadn't scored at all. By the end of it, we were fed up with the lanes, and everyone seemed to be gone (it was about 10:30 or so by this point, I guess), so we headed out back to the karaoke bar.

The karaoke bar wasn't actually a bar, it was a KTV, which is like the MTV I described back in the Taiwan entries. You get a room, a TV, and a machine for your karaoke purposes, and you belt it out in the privacy of your own friends and acquaintances, which means no nasty public embarrassment. Just semi-private embarrassment. It was great, although the room was ridiculously hot and we couldn't seem to get the thermostat to turn down, so all the photos of me are awful, I look like a tomato (it doesn't help we had been drinking beer since the bowling - this probably explained my 39/44 score, but I doubt it); but it was still loads of fun. I managed to figure out the machine and worked it the whole time, picking out some good songs and some not-so good ones, but most of them were so popular I was safe: some ABBA, The Beatles, Michael Jackson, Simon & Garfunkel... it was good. But I don't think we can go back, because I think I picked out all the good ones, haha.

After that, it was about midnight, and we weren't really tired and couldn't really call it a night, so we made our way to 1+1 and recreated the end of Jon's farewell party. We hung out at 1+1 for a few hours (the first of which was practically taken up by trying to figure out the drinks orders), dancing and having fun and talking over the speakers we were sitting under, and there was an ice fight, and drinking with some Chinese men (not too much - they were pretty crazy and moved on from us when we showed ourselves to be wimps), and fun was had by, I believe, all of us. Conversation is difficult at a club, and I didn't dance much, but it was fun just to watch and hang out - I like to people watch at 1+1 as much as I like to dance; probably more.

From there, we made our way outside, to be harassed by flower vendors, get our photos taken by the security outside the club, and walked all the way from 1+1 to the Muslim quarter, which we knew had places open 24-hours. It was about 4AM and we ordered 100 sticks of 烤肉, which are meat sticks (we got lamb but you can also get cow's stomach and other such delicacies), three spicy fried rices, and two large fried bread rounds. If you can think of a more awesome after-drinking meal than that (and yes, the six of us did finish all 100 sticks of meat), I will be surprised!

It was strange, though, because Ardan didn't really leave the dorm until Tuesday evening, when we (me, Andreas, and Malcolm) hung around in his room looking at his photos, talking about leaving and other interesting things, and eating pfeffernüssen. Then we walked him to a taxi, officially said goodbye, and that was it. Though... he had to hang around the airport overnight, because his plane didn't leave until 6AM. So a little more than 24 hours after we got home from the going-away party, Ardan was finally gone.

(Yes, he returned safely, though he had to relocate to a hotel because the Xi'an airport closes overnight.)

乾县 QIANXIAN COUNTY VISIT

Qianxian is a county two hours northwest of Xi'an, and my visit there was two-fold. First of all, the school that I work for invited me out to visit the tomb of Wu Zetian, the first empress of China. Secondly, they had organized a Christmas party which would be like a larger version of the Christmas event I did at the regular school here.

The first point was easy enough. Touring is something I do well and, like everything else in Xi'an, I had been to the tomb of Wu Zetian as well. Unfortunately with Chinese tombs, they don't seem to be open. You hear about the opened tombs in Egypt, all the artifacts they got and the history they gleaned from the pyramids and all, but the Chinese have been very hesitant to open their great emperors' tombs, and I have to say that's the way I like it. I'm sure I've said it before, about the First Emperor Qin's tomb, but I continue to believe that it's a smart decision on the Chinese government's part to keep these tombs closed until science has a way of preserving everything within it as it is excavated. Of course, that might just leave everything closed for years and years, people being scared of ruining things, but I still think it's best to leave things were they are. I only say that it's unfortunate they haven't opened it because when you visit, it's not really that interesting. You go to this site, see a mountain, see some statues all around them, and that's about it. Wu Zetian had some foreign envoys guarding her, a path over 2km long leading up to the mountain, two rows of guards - one representing military and the other culture - horses and their groomsmen, and two other hills about a kilometer away representing her breasts. There was a wordless epitaph stone, lions guarding the gates, and big stone constructs leading up to the tomb itself. So, it was interesting, and a spectacular view in the bright, blue skies and sunny day in the countryside, but there wasn't really much to see.

The second part of the visit was much more amusing. Basically what we were doing was helping to promote the Qianxian county branch of the school that I work for. There was another foreigner, a man of nearly seventy from Texas who is in Xi'an pursuing a relationship with a 45 year-old Chinese woman (I would make some awfully stereotypical comments, but Bill doesn't really seem that bad, or lonely, or anything you think of in the case of the older man/younger woman dynamic, and neither does she seem like a gold-digger or visa-hunter. But I digress), and we were both there to help give an air of authenticity, I think, to the organization. The Wednesday before, we had all put together a party, playing games and singing songs, teaching words and being silly having fun, and then this Wednesday, we put it on as a party for the children who attended.

Now, in reality, the party went well, though my performance was about as good as during the last Christmas event; it was more structured and was more interesting, involved the kids better and taught them the words in a fun and engaging way. It was better that they had a translation after we talked about Christmas, and that was fantastic. There was only one problem.

In a room less than the size of a basketball court, we had crammed 300 children, their parents, and we still had to make room for ten teachers and the activities we had planned. It worked out all right, though it was definitely more than a fire hazard as everyone welled up near the only entrance/exit to the building. The kids were deafeningly loud (they were having fun, I guess, and it would have been worse to get silence from a room of 300 kids), I couldn't scream over the top of them to save my life, and at the end of the party when we wound down into a game of London Bridge, everyone started to surge forward and the space in the middle was dangerously pinched. Once the festivities were over, the children sprayed two of the Chinese teachers with fake snow and silly string, mobbing them in the middle of the room and, once all the freon had been released into the room (with closed windows because it was too cold), they surged on Bill and me, trying to shake our hands and say Merry Christmas. That was all well and good, until Bill mistook one of the teachers' motions for the children to move as a sign to bring out the plastic bag of candy. All I have to say is I'm glad I have a little sister, because I would never have been able to wrestle away and hide the big plastic bag from the ravenous crowd otherwise.

Dazed and shaken, everyone took about an hour to wind down from the activities, drank some tea, cooled off (it was freezing before the children came in, but the activity and 300 little mouths breathing helped that), and packed up. We had dinner in the city, I was driven home with two of the teachers (Zhang Jing and Miss Hu) by the very abiding bus driver, and by the time I got back to my room, I had been out for a grand total of 13 hours. What a day!

I won't link pictures (I don't have any from the Christmas party yet, though I hope to get some from the headmaster next week), but they're all up over at Flickr, so take a look!

Next up on the social calendar: Christmas Eve party at Niki's! Which, I must say, promises to be eventful.

JON'S FAREWELL PARTY: Sunday 10 December 2006

I'm not sure how much I've mentioned Jon. In this blog, probably not very much, and I believe I've been calling him John with an h, because I didn't know until he gave me his email address that it lacked an h, so I suppose he needs a bit of an introduction before we say goodbye to him.

Jon's an American guy from Brooklyn, a philosophy major at American University. He's studied Chinese for two years at college and before he left he had been here for coming up on a year. He is a phenomenal Chinese speaker. He's just one of those people that's really outgoing, has no fears about saying the wrong thing, and I don't know how but he has an amazing vocabulary recall and seems to learn even the most obscure vocabulary words. He's in my class at school and, obviously, he's a pretty popular kid; he's just got one of those laid-back personalities and even a laid-back sense of humor, a sort of "whatever goes" attitude but not in that annoying "I don't know what I want" sort of way.

So, when we'd gathered together everyone he knew from the dorms and a few Chinese kids he's really good friends with, there were nearly thirty people in attendance. It was incredible, and lots of all sorts of people. I knew most of them, being in my class or having been at Niki's Halloween party, or having gone on the school trip to Henan.

It did, however, create problems when it came time to find somewhere to eat. The place we originally wanted to go to couldn't find room for us, so we wandered to South Street and went to a buffet. That was okay, I hadn't eaten all day (and had frozen my toes solid watching a football/soccer match the French guys are in) and I managed to scarf down a whole lot, but the food wasn't really that great and we all got split up between tables, so it was less of a Jon-oriented meal than one where we just sort of divided into our little cliques and ate some food.

Then we went to the world-renowned 1 + 1 club on East Street. (I only say it's world-renowned because kids in my Chinese class in Australia who had visited Xi'an knew about it, and I'd always heard about it.) I had yet to go to 1 + 1, either this time or the last, and it's a really nice place. I've only been to one nightclub before, and a jazz bar, in Xi'an, so it's not like I'm versed in nightlife, but it was definitely a really nice atmosphere. People there are used to foreigners being there, they probably expect it (though, I didn't see any other foreigners while we were there), and it's got good music and it's really clean. It feels a little bit like a maze to walk through, which is not really that fun when you're drunk, but I definitely liked the clean feel to it, mostly because it's so different to everything else you experience in Xi'an.

It was really much like your average night at a nightclub: drinking, dancing, and general frivolity. There are some highlights, though, and for brevity's sake I'll list them (but you all know how my lists go):
1. The drinks: Budweiser beer, which were Y25 each! This is absolutely exorbitant given you can get a 500ml bottle of Chinese beer right outside for Y3. We also got some Chivas whisky (which I think sponsors the club, given the amount of advertising), which they mixed with 冰红茶, which is just about the most common iced (red) tea drink you can get here. And before you start thinking that sounds gross, it's actually great. The iced tea is really sweet and somehow goes really nicely with the whisky. First of all we ordered a big combo deal, a beer each and a big bottle of whisky with mixers, and some small food (fruit, lollipops, chicken feet, you know...) which was Y50 each and, I think, an awesome deal.
2. However, as I mentioned the prices after you finish all that are ridiculous, and it drives most people outside the club and to a little stall for a Y3 beer so that you can get a cheap drunk and come back in. There's no cover charge at the place, so you just walk straight back in no worries. I hung out with the Western boys for most of the night, Ian a Canadian, Felix a German, and Jim a Briton, and of course boys being boys they went out at some point in the night. Which I followed along with, and it was actually quite fun. Not only was it fun to see Jim talking loudly in Chinese to the shop owner, we also stumbled across a Korean hairdressers that was quite interesting. We got there and they seemed to be practicing dance moves, supposedly for use as they cut hair. We thought this was hilarious, so we went inside and watched for a while. They sort of danced around à la Backstreet Boys to loud pop music and would swing scissors around their fingers and then do haircutting motions and... it was very strange indeed.
3. They played two Australian songs while we were there: one Rogue Traders song, and the really quite bad remix of Evermore's really popular song. I got really psyched for both of these, danced like a crazy woman, and had loads of fun telling people in shouted Chinese that these were Australian songs so I was very, very happy about it!
4. Briefly: chatted to Jim about Australia, as he's British and stayed for a while in New Zealand. One of those drunk conversations about politics and the state of the media, those sorts of things. Later: another German, David, drank too much too fast and passed out, then when we woke him as we were leaving, he threw up on the steps to the bathrooms, which I managed to step in without realizing (but realized before I slipped).

Then we headed out to get 烤肉 (kaorou), which are basically meat skewers. We took a fleet of taxis (we had to catch TEN on the way in but we were now about 23 people instead of 30) to the Islamic quarter, headed into one of the open restaurants, and ordered way more kaorou than we ever could have wanted. It was all spicy meat, liver and stomach and stuff and it was delicious but it was so spicy and seemed to upset my already beer-bubbly stomach, but it was all right in the end. I ate as much as I could fit in, tempered the spice with some bread, and drank some more beer. Talked to Felix a whole lot and I cannot for the life of me remember what we talked about (why he's in China, I think, but I can't really remember except that he's in the same, I study languages and what do I do with that? sort of boat), had to float Felix and Jim the money for the kaorou because they only had Y5 leftover from the club, and by the time we made our way out of the restaurant it was nearly 5AM.

The Koreans made fun of me for my accent and really, just tried to get a rise out of me because I'm such a quiet mouse in class and they want me to talk to them more. Then we took another fleet of taxis back to the university, collectively woke up the gateman (who wasn't the usual nasty-faced one, it was one of the women), and said a rather loud goodbye to Jon in the lobby. I guess from my perspective it sounds like I didn't have anything to do with Jon at all during the evening, but that's not true. We talked, told bad jokes at dinner, danced at 1 + 1, he taught me a Chinese kids' game that uses Rock Paper Scissors, and we talked about other random things during the night. So it was sad to see him go, but I'm the one who has to provide him with everyone's email address (Niki is collecting them for Secret Santa purposes), so I'm sure I'll talk to him again, and we're looking to be in China at the same time again anyway, so who knows. The world is small.

THE ADVENT CREPE PARTY: Monday 11 December 2006

Niki had been sent a few packets of crêpe mix in the mail a few weeks ago, so she'd been dying to have some sort of soiree where we'd all make crêpes together. She'd put it off, though, and so today it coincided with her desire to get a Christmas tree, and so (today being the second-to-last advent of the year) we turned it into an advent crêpe party. On the invite list: Niki, me, Malcolm, Ardan, and Andreas (another German).

This afternoon (after having slept off a hangover and had lunch with other hungover Koreans), we headed out to Metro, the big supermarket in the middle of nowhere, where you can find lots of Western food (real cheese and bread and wine and imported chocolates and biscuits and just wow), and also proper Christmas trees and decorations and things. Niki found her Christmas tree, and Andreas and I purchased little ones for Y20 to have in our room. I bought baubles, bells, tinsel, and lights for my tree, and so all up I spent about Y80/AU$13 on my Christmas stuff. Which sounds cheap, but then I also blew Y70/AU$11 on Twining's English Breakfast tea (100-bag pack). Those dollar values might sound like a lot, but consider I spent Y150, which is three weeks' worth of phone money.

We had to wait a ridiculously long time for a taxi, because at 4:30 taxis all change drivers (I have no idea why they don't stagger the change-over, but they don't), which means that from 4-5pm, it's virtually impossible to find a taxi that'll take you where you want to go. It took half an hour of us trying to find a taxi that would take us to the university (they all stopped to see if they could pick up a fare on the way to where they were going), , and of course we were still five people so Niki and Malcolm (who went to Niki's place first to get the crêpe mix) had to stay behind even longer.

Just after 6pm we started getting ready for the crêpe party! We held the party at the dorms, in the kitchen/laundry room on thr fourth floor (where all of us but Niki live). It took us an age to find the utensils we needed: we borrowed a bowl and frying pan from a classmate, a spatula and spoon from the kitchen that makes us lunch, and we just used the hotplate that's in our kitchen. We all also brought every piece of cutlery and crockery we have just so we could have something to eat off of, we used Malcolm's water bottle as a measuring cup for milk, and it was all very makeshift, but it worked out well anyway. Andreas and I put together his little Christmas tree, which we put on the fridge to be festive, I brought my computer as a musical aid, and we got cooking!

It was a nice sort of get-together, we chatted and cooked and wore our Santa hats and everything. The crêpes were really good, slathered in butter and brown sugar, or strawberry jam, or Nutella. At one point there broke out a war between Niki and Andreas as to which was the better chocolate spread: Nutella or Nussplimma, the latter of which is the German equivalent. You can guess who was rooting for what. We put this to the test, however: Niki took a blindfolded taste test, vodka in between to cleanse her palate, and she picked the Nutella. Of course, Andreas just told her she had picked the Nussplimma but I don't think she bought it in the end.

I ended up the evening getting photos from Ardan and taking some of my own Christmas tree, which I had put together as soon as we got back from Metro, and now I'm here writing about it all! Photos of the Advent Crêpe Party can be found at my Flickr account page, but there are no photos of Jon's farewell party because my camera is bad at taking night photos and anyway they wouldn't let you take photos at the club (I don't really know why).

Hopefully that's all for this week! Crazy start to it, hey? Ardan is leaving next week, so I think next Monday is also going to be a crazy night out, probably back to 1 + 1, and then the Sunday following that is our Christmas Eve party at Niki's house, complete with Secret Santas and loads of people! Then there's New Years, which I haven't heard of any plans for, but it all seems to wind up so quickly, I don't know how it all happens.

For now, it's 2AM and I need to be awake in far too few hours for class (one person turned up to our class this morning, apparently, and then another for the second hour, but neither of them had gone out the night before), so I think I'll call it a night and crash out.

Remind me to track down my Y20 from Felix and Jim...

TUESDAY

Our story begins on Tuesday 28 November, when I set out to get my boyfriend from the airport. I had planned to get the airport shuttle, but unfortunately the last one left at 6pm, so I had no choice but to get a taxi. I count insert a rant about bartering here, because a friend told me not to pay more than Y40 for a shared trip to the airport, but in the end I paid Y200 for a round trip and the guy had to wait for at least half an hour with me for Sam to get through customs. It sounds excessive when you compare it to the Y40 "suggestion" and okay we shared the taxi in the end, both ways, so the guy made more money than just my Y200, but the way I see it, he waited with me and I didn't really mind the sharing, and while the meter was running it was Y80 one way, so... I don't know. I am going to not rant because this entry is already going to be tl;dr so I'll try to minimize the tangents as much as possible!

There's not much I can say about Tuesday. I got Sam home all in one piece, weirded him out by speaking Chinese to the taxi man, and we uncovered the mounds of Tim Tams he brought as payment for staying at Niki's house for free (ten packets! Dude! And she has one left, haha), and that was about it! The flight got in at about 8:30, so we got home by 10:30 with all the fussing, and then went to sleep.

WEDNESDAY

Wednesday was sort of laid back. We went into class in the morning, just for an hour, because on Monday I'd gone to a performance one of the Korean girls was involved in, and talking to all my classmates they seemed enthusiastic to meet Sam! But then, they didn't come to class even though I'd said I'd bring him in; oh well! I got an hour's worth of class, Sam read a Nick Hornby book of mine, and then we met Niki later for lunch at our regular haunt across from the south gate of the university.

Then I had to go to my regular Wednesday teacher's meeting, which was somewhere unusual (Gao Xin area, where I used to live last time I was in Xi'an), so I took the bus with Sam and another teacher who knew where it was (right near the fitness centre we filmed the video at, in fact!) and hung around there. It was a regular teacher's meeting (ie, boring) until we all started to make Christmas decorations for the Christmas lesson I was to do on the weekend. Everyone got involved and it was loads of fun seeing what the teachers actually knew about Christmas (though I'm beginning to wonder where these traditions come from - I am the only one of the foreigners to put a wreath on my door at Christmas!), drawing Santa Claus figures with little Asian-style expressions, it was lots of fun.

Then there wasn't a lot of time left in the day, and we met up with Niki for dinner after a brief respite in my dorm room, and we caught up with Ardan and Malcolm and all went to the Korean restaurant just outside of the university's southeast gate. Ardan recently fell in love with the Korean restaurant (most notably, with the Korean sushi) and so he was not hard to convince on the idea. The Korean restaurant is great because they serve you this nice broth (just chicken stock with scallions, but somehow delicious!) instead of the regular tea to warm you up, and the menu is all pictures. I hadn't eaten a lot of Korean food before, and I really enjoy it; it's spicy, but it's a little sweeter than some concepts of 'spicy'. Kim Chi isn't something I'm going to get used to in a hurry, but apparently Koreans eat it with EVERY meal, and that isn't an overstatement. Most of the Koreans have talked about food in class, and they all agree everyone eats it all the time, and that seems a little bizarre - I can't think of an equivalent for any culture off the top of my head!

After Korean food was enjoyed, we adjourned back to Niki's and did something or other, maybe watched the new Superman movie. (We did that at some point, but I can't remember when it was, so let's say it was Wednesday night, just because we can.)

THURSDAY

Thursday we woke up ridiculously late, something near noon, and before we did anything I insisted on going back to my dorm room so I could change my clothes, get new ones (I don't know why I hadn't organized to leave clothes at Niki's before Sam even got there), and take a shower at the dorms because though my shower has its frustrations, I like it better than Niki's by far. We managed to sit around watching Strong Bad Emails for a while, checking email and things, and set out again after 3pm and headed to the Big Goose Pagoda. We paid our Y25 to get into the complex, Y20 to get up to the top, and I enjoyed it immensely. I've been there so much, been into the complex once as well, but it was really fun to go to the top, even though my legs cramped up on the way down. Seriously, I made it back down all seven flights, and then when it came time to get down another set of stairs to get back to the main complex, I couldn't take a single step down. It would have been all right after a while, but there was nowhere to sit, so I actually had to get Sam to CARRY me down the steps, which was incredibly embarrassing but there weren't too many people, so I didn't mind too much.

After wandering around and getting our Y20 worth inside the pagoda complex, we took a turn around the gardens, sat down under a little gazebo and talked until it got dark and we started to get frozen. We had dinner at the Yangrou Paomo place I'd already been to twice (here is a picture of the mutton soup; not my photo though!), and that is one of the best meals I have found to warm you up after being outside for ages, freezing your ass off. I definitely got as close as I ever have to finishing one of their huge bowls of soup (Y15/AU$2.45, a good deal though that's definitely tourist price), just because it was so nice to warm up with.

Niki called at some point, and we waited for her and for the light show to start in the safe and warm confines of a coffee shop, drank GIANT cappuccinos (they really were GIANT) to further warm ourselves up, but in the end we waited for half an hour in the cold for the light show to start. The light and water show was really spectacular. I'd seen the water show at its noon time slot before, but the night one was definitely better. Some crazy bastards, though, got between the spray to take photos and watch, it was insane! I didn't even bother standing up for the whole thing, it was way too cold as it was, I couldn't imagine standing closer to the water.

After that, we went home, warmed up while watching Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, and went to sleep.

FRIDAY

(To preceed the following section: if you haven't read or need a refresher on my previous thoughts about most of Xi'an's Eastern Tour attractions, here they are!)

Friday was probably one of the longest days I've had here in China (outside of tour-related days). It started at 9AM, when we met up with our English-speaking tour guide David at the south gate of the university. I'd arranged a trip for the two of us to go around to some of the sites on the Eastern Tour of Xi'an environs, and it was a pretty good deal. Just the three of us (me, Sam, and David), he spoke very good English, we saw three tourist sites, and a really great lunch was included, for Y520/AU$84.50 per person. First up were the Terracotta Warriors, and it was the third time I've seen them and I don't know... they sort of get more impressive every time I see them, but when you see it there, it's just sort of like a bit hole in the ground. I find that thinking about it is much more powerful, somehow: the concept that 70,000 people worked on it, many died, and it took 35 years to complete, each face individually madeby a team of artists... just for this one dude to be taken care of in the afterlife! That's incredible. The actual warriors themselves don't look like much, especially once you've seen them on postcards and television so often. You don't get anything more out of being in the big hangar-type building of Pit #1.

Next up was the First Qin Emperor's tomb, which we actually walked up this time, and we watched the little performance where they do a mock tributary ceremony. We got the downlow as to why they hadn't excavated the tomb, and apparently they've x-rayed it and everything and there are mercurial booby traps set up inside, and because they don't want to ruin the artefacts inside or poison the air around the place, they've decided to wait until the technology is around to solve both of these problems. As, for example, they are doing with the Terracotta Warriors - they're not excavating any more until they work out how to preserve the colors. They're dug up and there's these amazing bright colors on them, but they fade within half an hour. So, I think that's a good idea, and they can take however long they want to open up the emperor's tomb, which apparently contains lots of treasures, and he was buried with lots of workers and his concubines and stuff... it'll be interesting when it does get opened, because it was hidden and kept secret back in the day, so the tomb hasn't been raided or pillaged or anything, which will be really awesome to see.

We took a detour at another little museumy-type thing called the Underground Tomb or something, I don't really remember, but it was basically a mock up of the tomb. It wasn't really that great, I mean it was all fake and just guessing at the contents of the tomb, little models of the outside and lights and... yeah, the actual place wasn't that great, but it was then that we learned a lot about the tomb from David and got to talk about it a bit more in-depth.

After that was the aforementioned very tasty lunch (though the sweet & sour chicken is definitely better at our local place) and we got to visit a silk factory. Which was also a silk shop, of course, but it was still really interesting to see the way they made the silk, the machines and the way they stretched it, and the other tour guide that took us through was really cute and enthusiastic about speaking English. The quilts did look amazing and comfortable and I'd love to have one, but they were so damned expensive that I just couldn't justify it. Sigh!

Then we did the Huaqing Hot Springs, which was all right but David seemed to cut it short. I probably should have said something, but I really would have liked to go see the Chiang Kai-Shek stuff. It wasn't really late, but we were getting a little tired, so I sort of left it there and we took the trip home after that. There wasn't anything new or interesting learned there, so all I can say is: Huaqing Hot Springs STATUS - Still awesome!

We were planning to meet up with Niki at the Hyatt in the city for one of their famed Y170/AU$27.65 buffets. (As an aside, you have to know that this is an exorbitant price for dinner. EXAMPLE: tonight I had dinner with Niki at our regular haunt, got four dishes and three bottles of fizzy drink, and it was Y30/AU$5. That was a feast, too!) So we had to wander around the city for a while, along East Street which is the big shopping district, and we made it to the Bell Tower but were so tuckered out by touristing all day that we just had a long coffee at the King Coffee and waited until it was about time to walk back, detouring through some back streets as we went. Dinner was great, at advertised, and in the end we only paid Y100/AU$16.25 because they thought we were guests there, haha!

Then we made our way back to Jiaotong University for a party which we had only just found out about, being held at the other foreign scholarship building, affectionartely termed "Building 7" (all the dormitories have numbers and theirs is number 7; ours is 25, but we just call it the foreign students' dorm). So we changed at Niki's, washed our faces, and headed over to the party. We had heard about it from the French guys, but everyone was there! Sam, Niki and I made it in from outside, we caught up with Ardan the party animal and took him over, the Koreans were there, John made his way in later, we met up with Ian (who seemed upset but only when he spilt his alcohol and we demanded photos), and a bunch of people from Building 7 we'd never really met before. It was loads of fun, Sam took plenty of photos of me and then I commandeered the camera and took videos, which might get to YouTube later this week. Then we went over to a bar that's on the seventeenth floor (it has a name, but we just call it Floor 17) of a building right outside the southeast gate, where we danced the night away.

SATURDAY

Understandably, we woke up late the next day, but it couldn't be too late, as I still had to teach, and teach the Christmas lesson at that.

The Christmas lesson was an interesting experience. It... well, it didn't go well, let's just say that. They had explained the excercise to me as the foreigner telling the students about Christmas, a sort of cultural exchange and I should teach the kids some words along the way. This was all right, and so I went up there and started explaining Christmas in a very secular way, just explaining what people did, how they celebrated, and how things were different in Australia, lalala, but I could see that there was NO way these kids were understanding a word of what I was saying. Which was discouraging to say the least. There were a few really bright kids in the room (which was about thirty kids strong, so you can understand the sort of intimidation I'm talking about), and some of them understood when I asked them questions about things I had just explained, but that's really quite a rosy picture of what happened. So, I had to time-stretch, which had been made almost entirely impossible with them having told me that making wreaths was a waste of time. All I could think was, thanks for telling me ten minutes before the thing is supposed to start! The teacher eventually came up and told me to play some games, and after some unsuccessful games of Hangman (which I was informed was an activity for practice, not fun), she instructed everyone in Chinese to play Simon Says with me, and some vocabulary guessing game. The class went fifteen minutes late (and ten minutes into my other class), but I was ridiculously relieved once it was all over. So it didn't go badly, per se, but it didn't go wonderfully and I'm just keeping my fingers crossed they won't ask me to do it again at the Gao Xin branch.

Regular classes were good despite missing one student, and then we had dinner with Niki at our regular place again after a rest at the dorms.

Then there was a Foreigner's Party at Floor 17 which we turned up to with Niki, Ardan, and Andreas at about 10pm, but nobody really started showing up until midnight. Which was a little disappointing for Ardan, who just loves to dance, but eventually the French cavalry turned up and everything was much more rockin' than just watching the Turkish and Russian guys who had turned up groove by themselves. The night wore on, there were more beers, Ardan procured a Black Russian in a tiny martini glass for Y25/AU$4, and we got two bags of popcorn through the night, which in the Chinese tradition was sweetened rather than salted.

SUNDAY

Saturday over and Sunday was another day of city exploration. Sam and I went out with Ardan and Andreas (two very tall German guys) to the Islamic quarter to check out tourist alley for bargain Christmas presents, and the Great Mosque, which I had only vague recollections of from last time. (In fact, I only really know that I've been to the Great Mosque before because I remember tourist alley so well!) Sam and I bought bing to eat along the way, but otherwise salivated once we walked through the food markets, which were mostly filled with preserved fruit and nuts. We stayed there until nightfall (which is about 5pm these days), and checked out the restaurants in the area until settling on one where we were definitely the only foreigners. We did, however, get a seat by the radiators - nice!

That night we hung out at Niki's house with Malcolm, Sarah and Luca, and just had a good gab fest. I can't really remember what we talked about, but we had a few beers and Tim Tams and it was generally a nice night, despite the fact I'm amazed we made it to 2 in the morning without really talking about anything I can remember the week after. There were puzzles and talking about stupid laws, and Tim Tam slams, but that's all I can really dredge up about the, what, five hours we must have spent talking?

MONDAY

Anyway, that was a good night, and then the next day (after another necessary stop in at my dorm room) Sam and I accompanied Ardan on a bike trip around the city wall. He'd heard about it from Andreas a while ago, but he had never gotten around to actually doing it; and so with Sam as a handy excuse to go out, we all trundled out and got on the bikes for a 14km bike ride! We walked along the inside of the south wall for a while on the inside, checking out another touristy area (but we had maxed out our purchases during the trek to the Islamic quarter previously so didn't buy anything), and then hopped up for our long ride. It was actually really fun, and 14km sounds like a long way, but it was flat for the most part (if bumpy as all hell, the bricks were all potholes!), and the view was really nice the whole way along. There was a lot of construction going on at the gates, both on the ground and up on the top. The renovations they were doing on the buildings along the north wall was really annoying, because the scaffolding reached all the way around and we had to carry/pull our bikes through. However, I did see some people with a tandem bike, so I think they definitely got the worse deal. One of the coolest views, though, was the view of the Xi'an train stationfrom the north wall. It was more bustling (or felt like it) when we went to Henan, but it's always cool to get a different (ie, removed) perspective on the crowds at places like that.

We went back to the university soon after that, looked for a dumplings shop but we couldn't find the one Ardan had said he'd been to before. Sam and I hadn't eaten, so we were getting more than a little desperate, so we stopped at the noodle shop instead and got big bowls of red-braised beef noodles and it was absolutely delicious and absolutely filling. Still, an hour or so later, we grabbed Malcolm and went out for dinner again. I couldn't let Sam come to China without trying Hot Pot, so we went to a restaurant near Niki's place (after much contention as to whether the place we were hovering in front of was, in fact, the place we were thinking of) and it was fantastic. I love hot pot and don't know why I haven't been more often.

After that we tried to find another night market, but the only one we got directions to was the Islamic quarter again so we sort of bypassed it, wandered a bit, found a market on East Street selling ladies' underwear and fake Gucci handbags, and then headed back for a long, well-deserved sleep.

Sam left in the afternoon, we caught the airport shuttle bus, and I feel like I've needed the entire week to recover from the whole ordeal! I have barely been out for dinner once, such was my energy sapped! Tomorrow night, however, is John's farewell party. He's leaving on Monday, to do some stuff in Beijing before he gets back to America to finish up his degree, so we're going to dinner, eat our fill, and then party the night away, and not go to class on Monday. Yes, not going to class was part of the deal, John said so.

In any case, I have spent way too long writing this entry, and I seriously doubt anyone actually reads them all the way through, but it always feels good to get them all out!