After messing around for a while, showering and packing up the last of my things, putting Band-Aids on our various battle wounds (my blisters and Fergus' thumb stitches), we made our way out to Yuyuan Gardens, braving the crowds for what are apparently the best steamed dumplings in Shanghai. When they're in season, apparently, crabs are the biggest thing in Shanghai, and the Nanxiang Dumpling House at Yuyuan Gardens has the best crab meat dumplings and other fare in Shanghai. Of course, there are always massive crowds even without the dumplings, and we had to wait in line for half an hour to get a table that we had to share with five other people. In the end, it was nice and communal, and the food was well worth it.

What we ate was delicious, but it sounds absolutely disgusting, so prepare yourself for gross-sounding names. The specialty are crab brain soup dumplings, which are divine; they're filled with crab brain soup, and the trick to eating them is to bite a small hole in the side, suck out the soup, and then shove the whole thing in your mouth. I can't remember the name of the dumplings, but we made up a cross-cultural phrase that plays on the "don't teach your grandmother to suck eggs", only replaced "eggs" with the name of the dumplings. There were also shrimp balls, with crab something-or-other inside, and triangles made with spring roll wrappers that had tofu and crab ovaries in it. They sound gross, yes, but they were absolutely delicious.

Then we had a wander from Yuyuan Gardens, over to Xin Tian Di area, which translates to New World, roughly. It's sort of like the Rocks in Sydney, where they've kept lots of old buildings and done them up with cafes and restaurants and a live music venue. It's a smallish area, but the buildings were all built close together, so there are lots of little alleys, and it's home to some of the best and most modern restaurants in Shanghai. The architecture is called Shikumen, which has something to do with the stone and brick architecture. Short buildings, but gorgeous, and a nice walkthrough.

From there, we walked down the main shopping street of Huaihai Lu (where I had had dinner the night before; much better during the night with all the lights on, though!) and back to Fergus' apartment for last minute-type things. Somewhere in there I got all my shopping done, and my foot started to hurt, but it all worked out in the end. Fergus helped me to the Magnetic Levitation station, and my bags were manageable from there, with the aid of carts and everything. At the airport, I found that my bags were overweight and had to contend with that, but it turned out all right in the end, as my parents had given me some extra emergency money. Smooth sailing from then, though; I've been on enough flights that I really feel comfortable catching flights. And the Chinese customs officer was the smiliest customs officer I've ever had to deal with!

The flight home was good; nothing really went amiss and I saw a couple of movies - The Prestige and A Night At The Museum, both of which were all right, thought the first was a little dark for an in-flight movie - and finished up a book I borrowed from Garth in Guangdong. I didn't get any sleep, but by the time I got back to Sydney, my energy was back, just in time to show off all my photos to the family!

上海 Shanghai - Day Three remains copyright of the author alexifer, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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My first stop was the Jin Mao Tower 88th Floor Observatory. An absolute rip-off at Y70, but these things usually are. And anyway, I had money to blow, and I figured it may as well be on something like a great view of Shanghai from high up. Of course, there are things I could complain about - the haziness, the expense, and the other tourists - but it was interesting to look out over Shanghai from that vantage point. Shanghai is a huge city, not only population-wise (at the largest city in China, it is home to the same number of people as the entirety of Australia) but also in how much land it covers, and the amazing thing is that there are still development zones all over the city. A lot of the old city is being left alone now, but especially on the Pudong side there is lots of construction (right next door to the Jin Mao Tower is the site of the World Financial Center to-be). From that high up you can see the low-rise of the Bund and the high-rise of Pudong, and the rows upon rows of apartment buildings (some towers, others just six or seven stories tall) in complexes that are color-coded and the very vision of Chinese apartment life. I'm sure it's more spectacular on a clear day, but it was far better than the day before, when rain clouds obstructed the tower from view almost entirely.

Having started a little later than imagined, I lunched as soon as I got out of the Jin Mao Tower, over at the Super Brand Mall near the Riverside Park. The Super Brand Mall itself was something to behold - a real mall, in the sense that most Westerners understand it. I've been to lots of department stores in China, and buildings that seem more like shopping alleys packed into a lofty building, but not a real mall. This was a real mall, with all the brand names; not necessarily top-end brands (there's a mall like that in Xi'an), but middle-class brands like Quicksilver, H&M, and Mudd. The food court was standard: McDonalds and Hungry Jacks, Starbucks, and some other Asian food restaurants. I opted for the Thai restaurant, which was mentioned in the Lonely Planet city guide, and had my first Chinese Pad Thai - much more shrimpy than I like, but still very tasty.

From the Super Brand Mall, I made my way to the Riverside Park, where I wandered along the promenade looking over at the Bund daytime view. It was an interesting view, with the boats carrying advertisements and all, but nothing quite so spectacular as in the evening with the light show. Thinking of light shows, I finished my wander at the northern end of the Riverside Park and decided to check out what the Bund Sightseeing Tunnel was all about. The Lonely Planet city guide describes it as "a strangely pointless attraction", and notes that the flashing lights are "extremely under-whelming, unless of course they manage to induce an epileptic fit in one of your fellow travelers." I don't think I could agree more. It's definitely under-whelming, and sort of a waste of Y30, but I suppose you have to see it to believe it. It doesn't take very long, and the lights are too bright to make you feel like you're anywhere but a stupid tunnel going under the river, and even though they try to tie it together with different sections ("heaven and hell", "magma", "fossils", and "space lights" are the few I can remember), it doesn't really work and left me wondering "... what the hell was that for?"

After that fiasco, I took one of the walking tours in the Lonely Planet backwards from the exit of the tunnel. It is harder than you can really imagine to piece together a walking tour backwards, but only in knowing what you're supposed to be looking at. The map was easy to follow, but the instructions on what to look out for, what to take photos of, it was difficult to piece it all together. In any case, I managed it, and it was a lovely walk called "Beyond the Bund" that touched on a lot of old, untouched architecture from the early twentieth century. Since the writing of the edition that I have, a lot of the buildings have been marked as Heritage Architecture buildings and have plaques on them, which will undoubtedly be in the upgraded versions of the book, but I had to piece it all together myself. I saw some gorgeous pieces of architecture, a lot of which were banks, but there were a few buildings that used to be brothels and clubs, and there were also a couple of churches along the walk. A really enjoyable walk, but it didn't really feel like China most of the time - much like most of Shanghai.

After the walk, I ended up at Yan'an Donglu, which was the street I needed to be on to find the Shanghai Museum of Natural History. The Lonely Planet guide described it accurately as a "dusty museum" in a "drafty old building with bad lighting", but I'm not sure whether they meant to put it down or not. I found it a really enjoyable place, a building that obviously had a lot of history, and a museum with interesting and different displays from other natural history museums I've been to the world over. Definitely, as I noted to myself, the best Y5 I've spent in China. There were, as the book says, "a scary assortment of pickled and stuffed animals", but it was fascinating in its scariness. The main hall was the best by far, however, with huge, towering dinosaur skeletons found in Sichuan, a woolly mammoth skeleton from the Yellow River, a mummy section with two corpses from the Ming dynasty, and a section called "The History of Early Man" or some such title, documenting the history of human evolution, the rise of civilization, and the separation and distinctions between races. The latter was definitely most interesting, even if I couldn't understand it (as it was all in Chinese, but for introductions to different sections), and had the most creepy pickled animals - human fetuses from one month so six months old.

After gathering myself from museum foot, I wandered back up to Nanjing Donglu to look for a cafe to kill some time. The one in the Lonely Planet was a bust, so I found another one and sat around for a while (and did the aforementioned reading of the Lonely Planet city guide in full), had a mug of hot chocolate, and decided on my course for dinner. My feet were not holding out very well; when I got back, there was the biggest blister on my little toe I have ever seen, and I had been limping from hurting my right foot somehow since about halfway through the walking tour (I was about to cry from pain walking back from the museum), so I decided I would have an early dinner near home and call it a night. Nearly an hour in the coffee shop and I managed to make it all right to the Metro, changing lines, and a ten minute walk from the station to the restaurant I had picked out on Huaihai Lu.

I had Italian for dinner, a nice grilled sandwich and a glass of wine and coffee for a reasonable Shanghai mid-range price (ie, not Y12, but not Y200 either), and decided that I wasn't really disappointed I didn't have any Chinese food in Shanghai because... well, to be honest, I haven't found much Chinese food here, and what I have seen has been fast food crap which is inevitably bad fare. I did get decent order-in the first night with Fergus, but I wouldn't have liked to take my chances by myself when there were decent recommendations in the Lonely Planet anyway. Dinner was nice, I did some more reading of the Lonely Planet guide, and managed to let my foot rest enough that it was all right to take the walk back to Fergus' place. It was a good thing, too, because a taxi would have been annoying and expensive, and the walk was nice. It had been a really nice day, weather-wise, so it was still warm in the evening, and the streets were all lit up with shopping centers and advertisements, so it was good to get out and have a wander.

Then I made it back, uploaded my 80 photos from the one day (Luca took all the photos from the first day), and rested my feet up good.

上海 Shanghai - Day Two remains copyright of the author alexifer, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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A couple of friends from Xi'an were in Shanghai and had been for a couple of days, on the end of their New Years travels to Qingdao. Since I hadn't seen them before I left for Guangdong (they left the morning I arrived back in Xi'an), I met up with them at their lodgings at the original Jiaotong University here in Shanghai. Finding them entailed blindly guessing at the fare for a couple of stops (I worked out later that you could press what stop you wanted to go to just as easily), getting lost with how many Metro exits there were, and giving my umbrella a fair workout. I did, however, meet them at exactly the time we had agreed upon, which made me feel much better about the whole "getting lost thing". Our first stop was a steamed bun shop just down the road for a mid-morning snack, and then the convenience store across the road for umbrellas (they had forgotten theirs).

Our first real stop was the Jade Buddha Temple, which was about a twenty-minute walk from the train station Metro stop, over a massive footbridge, a little bridge over the Wusong River, and past a restaurant that still seemed to think it was New Years (it is, actually, technically, until Monday and the Lantern Festival) and was letting off a long string of very loud fire-crackers. The temple itself was also lovely, made a little quieter from New Years tourists and somehow older and more mysterious by the rain that didn't stop falling. There were a few main halls at the beginning, opening with three huge Buddha statues to which people were fervently praying, other gods all along the walls, and also a bell that people prayed to, along with the obligatory incense burning in the courtyard, despite the rain. The Jade Buddha itself (which cost another Y10 to see) was spectacular, though it is unfortunate that photography was strictly forbidden. It's a large, reclining Buddha, in this huge room with smaller Buddhas carved into the ceiling, encrusted with jewels and gold - quite a sight to see, and it apparently weighs more than 1000kg!

After wandering through a bit more of the temple (mostly to stay out of the rain for as long as possible), we went back to the Metro, though on the walk there I had to finally lay to rest my poor umbrella. It had treated me well for two whole years (I bought it in Vancouver on my round-the-world trip), but unfortunately just could not withstand the wind and rain any longer. I left it on the sidewalk, and we hoped that someone would pick it up and made use of it until it finally tore apart, never knowing that it was from halfway around the world (though, probably made in China).

Next on the list was The Bund, one of the most famous streets in China. (Though, really, can you think of any others?) By that point, however, we were decidedly hungry and tired (and more than a little wet - my shoes were soaked through and filled with water by the end of the first walk to the Jade Buddha Temple), so we decided to walk from People's Square down Nanjing Donglu and get a nice Cantonese lunch at a restaurant in the Ramada. Of course, given the rain and our poor understanding of map scale, we overshot by far too much and decided that lunch at a Portuguese restaurant that we just happened to pass would be much better suited to our tastes. It was a Macau Portuguese restaurant, so there was a lot of fusion-type stuff, but it was pretty standard fare for pretty standard prices. We spent as long as we could there, and after our meal I wrung out my socks in the bathrooms (literally).

Once we left the restaurant, we were blessed with clear skies and no rain, so there was nothing hindering us for the rest of the day. We wandered down to The Bund, as promised, walked along the promenade, and looked over at the Pudong skyline. It struck me then how interesting a juxtaposition the two banks of the Pudong river really are: on the one side, you have The Bund, which is all old, 1920s French architecture, and on the other, you have the modern Pudong high-rise office buildings jutting into the skyline rather impressively. The Bund is my favorite part, though, and walking down the promenade I was much more focused on that side than Pudonng.

We kept walking and decided maybe we would make our way down to the Yuyuan Gardens. (An aside: In English, this is a pretty redundant name, as the "yuan" in Yuyuan means "garden".) We didn't make it, though, because our feet were tired and we came across another park, the Ancient City Park, where we had a wander around, poked at a frog, and found a coffee shop to rest our feet again. It was mostly killing time, because we had eaten lunch late, and yet it was too early for dinner, so we sat around in the Black Orchid coffee shop inside the park and played with the candles, complained about Celine Dion, and watched the goldfish in the pond.

We did make it to the Yuyuan Gardens after resting our feet, but by the time we got there the actual gardens were closed and all that remained were the bazaar markets. Here, "bazaar markets" should be read as "tourist traps". It wasn't as bad as all that, of course -- well, it was, but the lighting displays that were on for New Years (and some that looked year-round) were just so cheesy that laughing at it and finding both Starbucks and Dairy Queen within the old Ming Dynasty gardens was just as enjoyable as if there were real bazaar markets (à la Great Mosque road in Xi'an). We wound our way through everything eventually, down Old Street, which was filled with more markets and tourist trinkets and souvenir shops, and back up to the closest Metro station, about a half hour walk back to Nanjing Donglu.

We made a pit stop on the way to dinner, back at Fergus' place, for me to pick up a fresh set of shoes and some money. I forgot the money after all the palaver with my shoes, but it worked out all right in the end - I came back for the money after dinner. Dinner was lovely - on a really nice restaurant and bar street called Hengshan Lu, we found a Middle Eastern restaurant called 1001 Nights. By the time we got there, it was just time for the live belly dancing to start, which was definitely a highlight of the evening, even if the music was a little too loud to accommodate mealtime conversation. It worked out all right, though, because we were so ravenous and the food was so delicious that we didn't need to talk through the twenty minutes it took us to eat the whole meal. The whole meal included falafels, a salad (both shoved into warm pita bread), a stew-type thing with gorgeous lamb and vegetables, and two sets of kebabs. It was absolutely divine after a long day's walking.

After an annoying stop back at Fergus' for money, we took the train quickly out to Pudong to catch the lights on the Bund. Since there's a power shortage in China, most of the lights in Shanghai turn off at 10:30pm (along the Bund and Pudong shoreline are the most noticeable, though). We made it to the shoreside Häagen Dazs at about ten, which was later than any of us would have really liked, but it gave us enough time to take a few photos and sit down with our ice-creams and enjoy the view for fifteen minutes before the lights shut off all at once. Which was amusing to watch, at any rate. We hung around at Häagen Dazs until a little after eleven, since I had been told the Metro stops at midnight, but this was clearly false by the time we got to the shuttered-up Liujiazui station, so we had to catch a taxi back into Fergus' place first (just that leg of the trip was Y25!) and then I said goodbye to Luca and Sarah for the last time (they left the next afternoon) and they went ahead to their hotel.

Needless to say, I collapsed that evening and couldn't think of waking up until 10AM the next day.

上海 Shanghai - Day One remains copyright of the author alexifer, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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1. Return modem at about 9AM. Receive Y300 deposit back, yay!
2. Kill a little time maybe, until an early lunch time at 11:00.
3. Make tracks to get myself into the city with all my bags (Malcolm is going to help me) and to the airport link bus stop for the 1PM bus.
4. Get to the airport around 2PM, one hour before my departure time.
5. Check in and wait around for my 2:55 flight.

Then there's the flight, which will be nearly two hours, and that's sort of boring so I won't bother talking about how that will go (find seats, eat peanuts, etc.)

Then in Shanghai, the friend I'm staying with is unable to meet me at the airport, but he's given me good instructions as to how to get into the hotel he will be working at. It requires taking the Magnetic levitation airport express train (whee!), transferring to the Metro, and then taking the train a couple of stops into the center of Shanghai, where he will be waiting for me outside the hotel.

That, or I decide my Y300 deposit money would be better spent than saved and I get myself a taxi to the hotel because my bags prove to be too heavy or annoying.

Two friends from Xi'an are in Shanghai travelling at the moment, and really only one viable day (tomorrow) crosses over, so I'm going to give them a ring tonight and arrange to meet up. They're staying in the campus accommodations at the Shanghai Jiaotong University, which is pretty cool! It also seems they have the internet in their room, so they are well set up. I found online that there's a nice river cruise you can take down the Hungpu river for Y120 for a 3.5 hour trip, so I thought I might do that with them seeing as they have already done all the other things on my list.

Then there will be museums and shopping streets and the Jin Mao Tower view, and the Bund (I have procured a walking map that shows you where you can see the Bund best from the opposite side; there's a Starbucks and Hagen Daaz that you can just sit in for hours, which sounds pretty awesome to me! Other than that there's a historical park in the old section of the town, and old residences of Sun Yat-Sen and Zhou En-lai, and another pretty park in the French Concession area. There'll be plenty for me to do and see, fill up my days with.

If there's nothing (or if this sniffle I seem to have acquired plagues me more than necessary), I'm sure my friend has the internet at home, so I'm sure I'll be able to post something just before I come home.

IN FOUR DAYS!!!!!!

Last Few Hours in Xi'an! remains copyright of the author alexifer, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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Garth lives in a city just a couple of hours from Guangzhou by bus, a gorgeous tourist city called 肇庆 Zhaoqing. The weather was warm and very refreshing after being in Xi'an for so long, though it was a little sticky. That's about the only thing bad I can say about the city and the weather itself. The city was absolutely lit up for New Years, with big lanterns everywhere and big lit up floats on the side of the main street - scenes from New Years featuring lots of pigs, moons and lanterns and everything. There are lots of trees everywhere and the air is nice and fresh, there's a big lake with trees surrounding it that are lit up green and purple every night, and there's mountains in the surrounds. In short, the perfect city for fengshui - when they built a bridge across one of the rivers, they built a temple in one of the mountains that nobody really goes to but was just to keep the fengshui happy. It was a gorgeous city and I can see why Garth keeps going back every year, as he has done for four years or so now.

For the first couple of days, we didn't spend it in Zhaoqing, but another city three hours away called 东莞 Dongguan, to visit an Australian friend of Garth's called Matt. Dongguan was, as Matt pointed out, more of a frontier town. They didn't have a consolidated taxi service, just cars that go around asking if you want rides (some of which are dangerous for tourists - as in, they'll take you to the middle of nowhere and rob you), and you could see the development happening before your eyes. It wasn't a town that had been around before, and you could tell that just from looking. There might have been farms there before, but most things were new, and the place Matt lived in was a residential complex that was still being built, empty shells of buildings and those with scaffolding still on them; it was an incredible sight.

We went to Dongguan with three lovely Chinese women who taught English, so our days were spend speaking an (often amusing) hybrid of Chinese and English, and it was really lots of fun. I learned a lot about the condition of 热气, where your qi (that inner force you've probably heard of before) gets hot and makes you uncomfortable, gives you pimples or a headache or any number of things, and can be brought on by eating food spicier than a hotdog, eating too many cherries, or washing your hair too often. We taught them the concept of sarcasm, though none of them really mastered it by the time we were done there.

In Dongguan we spent most of the time eating and drinking at various different restaurants (Hunan, Guangdong, Western, seafood, Dongbei), always with beer (always cold). On the first day we also went bowling for an exorbitant price and I did nowhere near as well as I did at Andreas' farewell (I fear my legendary 127 will never be beaten), and spent most of the evening inside, drinking too much vodka and playing card games. On the second day (which was Valentine's day), we went to get our hair washed, which is actually more interesting than it sounds. They wash your hair, but they also give you a massage, head neck and shoulders, and then they blow dry your hair. It was nice, but also my first encounter with the fact that I cannot understand Guangdong people at all - not only do they speak predominantly Cantonese, but their accent is ridiculous: they drop end consonants and change consonants around ('r' becomes 'y' - see how confusing that is)! We also went out to a club after watching Jackass (I laughed too much to admit to), where we played a dice game that seems to be the centre of club culture in Guangdong, but which I am also unfortunately crap at. It was all right amongst people who weren't so good at it either, but when I was playing with Garth and the woman that took care of our table, it just wasn't even worth playing I was so bad.

We got back to Zhaoqing the next day (Matt had gone home to Australia for the first time in 14 months - yikes!) and met up at another club with some of Garth's friends. The club was nice, better then Dongguan and much more comparable to Xi'an, the music was better, and it was funny to watch all the guys actually get up out of their seats to watch the dancers when they came onto the stage. I was subjected to yet more dice games which I lost terribly at, and speech that I could barely understand (it's a club, are you really supposed to be trying to converse?), but his friends were nice and the next night we went to someone's house for a nice hot pot dinner.

The dinner was much better than the night out at the club. I love hot pot, and it was the sort of style where you put the hotplate in the middle of the table and put the vegetables and things in and serve yourself. I still couldn't understand what was going on because they were all speaking Cantonese, but when they wanted to speak to Garth or me, they translated themselves into Mandarin, and Garth offered translations of the more interesting or funny parts of conversation. Most of it, though, he said was pretty boring conversation - they were talking about computer memory or something at one point. They were fun, and we drank some nice, cleansing 普洱茶 pu'er tea, which is actually quite vile if you smell it and it sort of tastes like dirt, but it was nice for my liver after a few days of drinking beer constantly. We took a walk home through the empty streets later on, and Garth pointed out the prostitutes to me on the way. It was interesting, because they all had a sort of uniform on - white shoes and denim jacket, blue shirt, and white skirt (or jeans for the boys).

One night, we also went out to a night food place, spicy Sichuan (previously, Szechuan, for those playing in the 20th century) food, and we had a cold noodle salad and a duck salad, which I thought tasted pretty 差不多 much the same, but apparently that was mean to the masters of food. The toilets there were described as "adventurous", which I suppose they were if you weren't warned that the part that wasn't raised was entirely flooded with water! Other than that they were standard, dirty squat toilets without doors. There were at least partitions? Another night we also went out to his local Muslim noodle shop, which was great. Just like the one across from the south gate here, the food was very familiar and so good. I can't actually remember which nights these happened on, so I'll just throw them in here.

The next night was a birthday party for the mother of one of Garth's Chinese friends. It also happened to fall on Chinese New Year's Eve, so it was loads of double celebrations. We spent the afternoon shopping for a nice potted plant for the birthday girl, since there were flowers and orange trees being sold at a big plaza for New Years, and we chose some gorgeous purple orchids for her. After leaving the gift at their house, we went out to a restaurant hidden away from the bright city lights, with all of the family, and celebrated with lots of good food and drinking. It was the first time I had to exercise anything close to Chinese customs and I fell on my face a couple of times but redeemed myself in other ways. Again, I didn't know what was going on for the most part, not in any sort of detail, because it was all in Cantonese, but they spoke Mandarin to Garth and I again (he understands Cantonese, but obviously it makes sense to remind themselves to switch), but it was a fun evening and I spoke to one of the cousins and the parents, despite not being able to understand anything on first listen still. Garth's friend was the easiest to understand, then her parents, and the young kids and old grandparents were impossible to understand.

Garth went out that night to get smashed with all of his friends, but I opted out because my liver wouldn't have liked me for it and it would all be Cantonese and dice games and people I don't know. I watched almost all of Desperate Housewives while he was out, though, haha.

The next night, for the first day of New Years, we went to the same family's house to see the fireworks, which was lots of fun. They have a seventh-floor penthouse apartment with a split-level roof area just near the lake, and it was the perfect vantage point to see the big fireworks display the city put on. We had dinner first, learned how to cook a chicken in soy sauce and 米酒, which I guess is rice wine vinegar? I'm not sure. Gorgeous, though, and dinner was lovely with a few New Years wishes and drinks. The mother also gave us some lucky money, which is given out to unmarried youths at New Years, which was terribly generous of her. The fireworks display was absolutely gorgeous, and the only thing I actually bothered to take photos of, though we were so close they were incredibly loud and they set off car alarms everywhere around. The kids played with little fireworks starters (no firecrackers, thank goodness) and the little whizzy things that spin like a top when you light them, which was loads of fun too but I couldn't help but think of the stories of Guy Fawkes Day dad used to tell us: how fireworks were fun to play with every now and then some kid would blow his fingers off.

The next afternoon we had lunch with one of the other teachers at the school Garth works at, which was fun. The friend was an older, gay American man, who had brought his Chinese boyfriend (they had rings and are moving in together in Guangzhou) and another friend, a woman visiting from Maine. We had hotpot again, and it was nice to be able to understand and contribute significantly to the conversation again, which was fun. We talked about lots of things, but it was especially interesting to hear the woman from Maine's perspective on the things she'd seen over New Years - like families going kite flying in the parks and everyone looking so happy. It gets to a point, I suppose after six months, where you stop noticing things like that, and things aren't new all over again, so it's interesting to hear a newcomer's perspective. We talked about other things too, of course, but I can't remember any of them. We went back to the school to help clean out (read: scavenge from) the American man's old dorm room, spent a while trying to figure out how to add money to my phone, and then I took a nap while Garth went to do laundry at the hotel.

That night and for breakfast the next morning, we went to a little restaurant down in the village (Sanmao, but I don't know how to write it, I can only guess it's 三毛), one of the few that were still open over New Years, which was really delicious. A lot of familiar food to me, though I didn't see any 木耳炒蛋 wood-ear fungus and eggs, which is my favorite dish here in Xi'an, and I ate until I was so full on the day that I left that I didn't need to eat for the rest of the day!

The train ride home was uneventful, though I really have to say that the middle bunk is the best of all on the hard sleepers. The bottom one, you have people sitting on your bed and you can't go to sleep because they'll all be up talking into the night (if Murphy's law means anything), and the top bunk is so cramped I could sit up but only if my head was stuck between my knees. I didn't sleep as well, though, so I think I'll blame to top bunk factor on that point, too. The middle bunk (which I had on the ride in) wasn't that much better, it was an annoying height that meant I couldn't quite sit up with my head down, but it was definitely easier to maneuver around than the top bunk. You can also see out of the windows from the middle bunk, and reach your things when you're standing on the floor. Thankfully, though, on the ride home I had a good playlist on my iPod and a good book that Garth had lent me, so I spent most of my 26 hours lying in my bunk reading.

Back in Xi'an and it was cold, there were ten times as many fireworks going off in the city, but I had a very strange sense of familiarity as I drove through the city and chatted to the taxi driver, and as I walked through the dark campus to my dormitory. Now I only have ten days before I'm home in Sydney, and six until I leave for Shanghai, and so many things to do in that time that my mind is definitely working overtime - last night I couldn't sleep for thinking about how to pack my things! The trip to Gaungdong was definitely worth it, though; a nice rest from the Xi'an weather, and it was great to see another section of China. I have definitely been to more places in China than most Chinese people have ever been after this trip.

One list before I go, though!

INTERESTING THINGS I ATE IN 广东 GUANGDONG:
1. Chicken's feet: first night, Garth and I had pizza at a Western restaurant, but had chicken feet for appetizers. Mostly I just didn't know how to eat chicken's feet, so I'd never done it before, but they were all right. A little rubbery and hard to get the meat off of, but they were all right otherwise.
2. Frog: at the birthday dinner. I'd never eaten frog before, and it was chopped up and rather tasty. I saw and ate one of the little feet, but I didn't actually know what it was until I asked Garth - I thought it might have been turtle. The skin wasn't so good though.
3. Duck's head: at the night food plaza. The duck salad was, I found out, duck's head salad, though I had the suspicion as I picked up a piece of bones that had something that looked like a beak on it. Also tasty, but the little bones were annoying.
4. Jellyfish: at one of the lunches in Dongguan. I've probably eaten it before, but this was the first time it was named to me. Too rubbery to chew, really, and I had to swallow it all whole.
5. Goose intestines: at another of the lunches in Dongguan. They were all right; I'd eaten some other form of intestines at Ms. Gorman's host family last time I was in Xi'an, but these were different. Smaller, and they were tasty but rubbery (this is not a catch-all reason for why I won't eat "interesting" things again - just rubbery is not a texture I'm a fan of), but the sauce was delicious so I just stole the sauce for the rest of it.

广东 Guangdong Province remains copyright of the author alexifer, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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That said, the boredom won't last much longer, as I'm off to Guangzhou in ten days!

And okay, I'm not really bored. Just that most of my activities seem to center around food, which is fine because Chinese food is awesome and probably the thing I will miss most about the country, but it makes me feel a little lazy. I've done a few things, but they're not particularly interesting. I'll let you in on the highlights, because detailing the time I spent five hours watching Battlestar Galactica with Malcolm doesn't really make a good story.

AUSTRALIA DAY 2007!

It doesn't really deserve a big header like this, because it was a pretty standard evening, but I thought I'd highlight it because it was probably the most interesting thing to happen this week. Which isn't really saying a lot about the rest of my week, but that's all right.

Early on in the day, I went into the admin office here at the Chinese language program to pick up my grades (average of 80 all around) and get the low-down on my visa stuff. Mr. Wang said I could just take my stuff in and they'd fix it right up, so I got the address from them, got my pieces of paper together (of course, I hadn't bothered to find a place to photocopy it the day before, but there were plenty of places in the city). So I caught the bus with a Japanese classmate of mine who was going to get some professional photos taken of her because a friend had given her a free pass (they look expensive, usually used for wedding photos), and managed to find my way around to this mysterious place.

Once I'd gotten my photocopies done, filled out my forms, gotten a receipt and everything, I was told that it was too early to put it in! The woman behind the desk told me I could come back later, three days before I left the country (impossible, but I figured I'd explain it there), and fix it up then. So all that trip and worrying for nothing! Even though Mr. Wang said he had called the office up to let them know I was coming in. Oh well!

That evening, celebrations started late. We went to a hot pot restaurant, but we got there a little late so we were waiting around for a long while. As we were waiting, this little toddler kept walking around us with her mother, and after a while, encouragement on both sides, he decided it was all right to wave at us. After that, he wouldn't stop looking at us and waving. It was adorable, and of course I can't resist when babies wave at me, so I was there waving and making faces while everyone else in my group sort of stared at the kid and wondered what it was staring at.

The hot pot was good, as usual, and we found out that beer was included in our fee, so we all had a few beers and were a little tipsy by the time the evening came to a close. We discussed many things, amongst them Australia and the way civilizations seem to evolve and why they all evolve differently (we of course lacked Niki, the anthropologist...), and decided after dinner that playing video games would be a good way to spend the rest of the night. So we got some whiskey and mixers and went back to Sarah's room to play Katamari for what was near to six hours.

So there wasn't a barbecue, warm weather, pool activities, boat races, or fireworks, but at least there was beer?

OTHER THINGS

During this time frame, I:

1) went out with a girl Mr. Wang had introduced me to, named Yvette. I took Malcolm, Sarah, and Luca out with me and we had a great lunch filled with snack-type food, had a walk around the city, and spent hours in an all-you-can-drink tea shop playing Chinese checkers, connect-five, and chess. Made our way home via the large supermarket which lacked any DVDs I was looking for.

2) looked for DVDs for my family. They put in an order the last time we spoke for me to pick up as many Oscar nominated DVDs as possible, so I went on three separate attempts to find as many as I could (I had a short list and got 18/26!), at our local guy, at the Saige Computer City (where Malcolm picked up his repaired camera), and out at Xiaozhai. It was fun to go on a scavenger hunt, and I picked up a few other ones I was looking for along the way.

3) finished Fever Pitch, which was an absolutely great book. It sort of justifies a lot of the obsessions I've had over time, and just little parts of my personality, though maybe it shouldn't, but I've really enjoyed it. It's sort of frustrating, as a young person, to read someone's autobiography like that though, because I keep wondering when I'm going to get that sort of perspective. Maybe I'm just impatient.

4) downloaded lots of music (such good music I will probably buy the CDs when I get back to Australia), played around with my Facebook, and also started watching Battlestar Galactica with Malcolm. These things are known as "time wasters".

5) got my Chinese travel agent friend to get me my ticket to Guangzhou, which was today, and it was a pretty good deal. Y420 (+Y50 fee for him) for a 26 hour train ride on hard sleepers around Chinese New Year? I think that's just about perfect, really. I have to get another ticket on return from Guangzhou (which I wasn't actually expecting to do, but the expense won't be bad), and figure out someone to get my ticket to Shanghai from Steve while I'm away, but that shouldn't be too bad. So, ten days and I'm on my way to Guangzhou and a change of pace!

PLANS FOR THE UPCOMING 10 DAYS

I'd planned a photo scavenger hunt with Malcolm, so we'll probably get going with that next week. It's mostly to beat boredom and get me out and about while I'm still in Xi'an. I've seen a lot of things already and I'm comfortable with a lot of places, but I guess this is like a last-ditch effort to push me out of my comfort zone in a city I feel quite safe in already. We've got challenged for ourselves including: crazy fashion, street food vendors, leftover Christmas decorations, and bridal photo groups. None of these things are difficult to find, of course, but we're going to make sure we don't go to the same old places to find these things. So that should be fun, and it doesn't really matter if we actually get everything on our lists, but at least we'll have gone out and done something.

It's not really my going away, though, because Niki and I will probably have a joint going-away (she is moving to Beijing, hopefully, by March) in the time between my getting back from Guangzhou and leaving for Shanghai, and while Sarah and Luca will be away during that time, they're going to come and potter around Shanghai with me for a day or two. I might do some preparation for leaving, like packing some things I won't need to use, but I'm pretty sure my time wasters will take care of the little free time I will have, and anyway I'll have nearly a week back in Xi'an for last minute things so it's not really important I get all those things done.

And I've just forgotten that I had laundry going, so it's probably done and I should pull it out before I go to dinner!

寒假: Winter holidays in Xi'an remains copyright of the author alexifer, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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So I present to you: JANUARY. In no particular order!

EXAM WEEK AT JIAOTONG UNIVERSITY

There is the strangest phenomenon here at Jiaotong University Chinese Language Program, and that is that a large portion of students seem to attend the classes up until the time of the HSK (Chinese Proficiency Test), and then they start dropping off like flies. Personally, I had suffered a mid-semester/December lull period in my attendance, but it seems that everyone else managed to keep steady through that time because they weren't going to stay through January.

Which meant that I, having made a personal promise to myself to attend each and every class in January (which I kept!), was the only student in class at times. Especially for the first classes of the day, I was the only one there for the first hour, or two hours. Usually someone would turn up for the last two hour period of classes, but often I was there alone for an extended period of time, and it sort of ruined class for me because teaching to one student? Boring for both myself and the teacher, so we more often than not just ended up talking about random things. I found I'm best at talking about myself, which I suppose isn't surprising, but it's easier to talk about what I know rather than prescribed topics, which is what trips me up so much in class.

I learned lots of interesting vocabulary (science fiction, androgynous, political party - not all from the same conversation!), and had lots of interesting conversations (well, the vocab tells you the stories!), but it was all sort of useless for the exams. The exams weren't terribly pressing. I took two of them the week before the official Exam Week - for my Reading Comprehension class and my Writing class. I got an 80 and 88, respectively, but I haven't received my grades back from my other exams.

The thing about exams was that there was only one I could really study for, because Listening and Speaking weren't the sort of exams you could study for. Speaking we didn't even get our topic until that day, so we couldn't prepare, which was unfortunate because it was a topic I had no idea how to answer and found myself flailing and incredibly under the seven minutes we were supposed to discuss gender equality in our countries. Honestly, even if I were speaking in English I couldn't fill seven minutes on that topic! I have no experience with it, no examples to make, and it was sort of disappointing, but at least my teacher knew that I could actually talk about things. My listening exam went well enough - though it got harder and harder as the exam went on, which was unfortunate. There was also one part that talked about robots and I think the word for robot (which is particularly alliterative) will be stuck in my memory forever.

The other exam that I could study for went well, too. I didn't get everything, but there was a lot of material to study and it was difficult to shove it all back into my brain. It helped that we had been tested on each of the sections, though, because at least I had the experience of studying and preparing the lessons before, so it was more just refreshing my memory. Of course, it didn't work entirely well and I still forgot things (even things I knew I had studied - very frustrating!) but that's what happens in exams. Also, I had gotten a slight case of food poisoning the evening before and literally lost my lunch, so I lay some blame off onto that.

But otherwise, classes and exams were worthwhile and not too stressful, and now my semester is officially over! SCHOOL'S OUT, WOO!

CBA BASKETBALL GAME: SHAANXI VS. BEIJING

Ardan had always expressed a desire to go to a basketball game, but it was the other German on the fourth floor that finally propelled us to go. Sarah, Luca, Andreas and I went to dinner at the noodle place (of sheep-gutting fame) for dinner, and he suggested we catch a game. None of us could think of any reason not to, so we found out where the tickets were being sold and, for Y30 (AUD$5) we got a pretty good seat to watch the game!

The game started with standing for the national anthem. No hands over hearts or anything, and there were only a couple of people in the whole crowd mouthing or singing along, but I have to say it was very difficult for me not to join in. I learned the words to the Chinese national anthem last time I was in China, and the words and tune have stuck with me, so hearing it I just wanted to sing out loud, but I thought that might attract a bit of attention (not like nobody noticed the four white kids in the audience, but they weren't particularly bothered as long as we cheered for the home team), so I staved off the desire.

The match was Shaanxi vs. Beijing, and our team was not particularly proficient and lost by about ten points, but the experience was still lots of fun. The sponsors of the game (Hans beer and a Chinese sports clothes brand that is only defined by a Nike-like swoosh) handed out these inflatable sticks that everyone used to clap and make noise with, which helped with the clapping and whooping throughout the game. I didn't realize how fast a basketball game moves, because they have 24 seconds to get the ball in, which makes sure that everything moves really quickly and it was definitely action-packed! Or at least, felt like it was action-packed.

The best part of the game was, however, the cheerleaders. There were the typical pretty little girls in few clothing (the venue wasn't heated though so after half time they took to wearing big yellow coats, taking them off for the dancing bits), but there were also these fat dudes who also danced with the cheerleaders. It was definitely a funny sight, I guess the fat guys were the comic relief, the shout out to the common man in the audience, but it was hilarious, and we got plenty of photos which are up on Flickr now (after things finally decided they could be uploaded).

KARIM'S BIRTHDAY PARTY

Karim is one of the French guys in the large tapestry of foreigners here at Jiaotong University, and he's been at both of Niki's parties so we sort of used her invite to get into a party at Building 7 for his birthday. We brought plenty of alcohol and snacks, and he seemed to be very welcoming so it wasn't so much stealing her invite as just adding merriment to the party. (I say we used Niki's invite because she didn't turn up until about an hour later, but I usually have no way of gauging whether people will be welcoming or think we're crashing.)

It was a regular sort of party, though of course there was an interlude nearing midnight for present-giving and many renditions of Happy Birthday in different languages (English first, French, Chinese, I think someone tried for Spanish too...), which was more than amusing. Karim got a pair of Beijing masks from another French friend of his who had recently moved to Beijing from Xi'an, and he had lots of fun trying to scare people with the masks (I think he succeeded with a few people).

We adjourned after a while to a club in the city, which of course was yet another disaster of logistics, but we all made it there in the end, about twenty people or more, I'd say. We all put our coats in the same coat check, which was just about the most hilarious thing ever, both for the moment we handed them over and had to retrieve them. Handing them over just had the coat check window as a big pile of coats and bags, and retrieving them involved leaning through the window and directing the poor woman to the coats and bags we could see were ours.

The club was lots of fun, they played a good mix of Chinese and Western music, and at one point we made a foreigner's congo line around the bar. There were lots of people by that point (I figure we picked more up at the club), and we almost had it entirely circling the bar, but it dissolved after two rounds. Otherwise, it was just lots of fun dancing with everyone to great music! There was a little platform and everyone (except for me, of course) had a try up there, which was really funny, but after a while we all got sort of tired and just wandered out. The trouble with clubs is it's hard to say goodbye.

After retrieving our coats we found Felix and Basil outside eating soup and steamed buns, so we chatted to them for a bit before deciding that it was a good idea to get some soup and steamed buns for ourselves, so we did that, sat outside in the freezing cold and ate our late night food and drank bottles of water. Much better than kebabs, any day!

DINNER WITH TEACHERS

The teachers at the English school I teach at have been so friendly to me over the time I've been there, as they're all about the same age as me, and I have been out with one of the teachers twice in the last week. Her English name is Marbrain, and I have no clue where she got that name, but it's easier for her to use her English name at work because there is another teacher with almost her exact name (the second character is different but even the tones on that are the same).

So on the Friday of exam week, I went with her to one of her student's house to make dumplings and have dinner. The kids (Sunny, Sunny 2, and Fei - the latter of which is not an English name, obviously) were very enthusiastic, using all the English they knew to make me feel welcome and ask me all the questions they could think of - my favorite food, animal, sport, etc. I was shown around the house, made comment on the fact I had been watching kids' TV for the last week (and the TV stayed on the kids' channel all night), and managed to use my well-reviewed polite words to give a gift of fruit and nuts to the mother. I'm not sure where the father was, but he was not there for the evening.

It was really fun! Marbrain and I put together the dumplings and then the mother cooked them while we talked to the kids about the cartoons on the television (and of course, the one I don't really quite get came on and I had to admit I had no clue what it was about). Dinner was good, the kids ran off after a few dumplings and I talked with Marbrain and the mother in Chinese and English, alternating with what I wanted to say and how drunk I was getting.

See, the mother offered me some "alcohol", right? And I was like, yes of course I can drink alcohol! Not knowing that I was getting myself in for Baijiu, which is just about the most foul alcohol ever. The particular sample I got was 56% alcohol and we each drank a little shot glass of it (well, Marbrain gave me some of hers because she had to teach in the next hour), and of course I had to drink it, cheers and all, because it was the polite thing to do, but Biajiu is definitely not the sort of thing I'd choose to drink. Ever.

Then this week on Monday I went to Marbrain's house and we made hot pot together. We went for a walk around the city first - she wanted to show me somewhere I hadn't been before, which was nice but I just don't know the names of any of the places I have ever been! So it came to pass that I had been there before, a few times, but that was all right. We walked and talked and it was lots of fun. For the curious, I talk with her half in Chinese and half in English. Sometimes it's easier to say thing in one language as opposed to the other, so it can change easily, but it's good because she mostly speaks to me in Chinese but she knows how to translate if I don't quite get it.

Then we caught the bus to the supermarket near her house, took nearly an hour to buy all the ingredients for hot pot (lots of vegetables and thinly-sliced meat, basically) and some fruit and yoghurt for snacks. Making hot pot was lots of fun; mostly consisted of cleaning and chopping up all the vegetables, and of course the hot pot itself is really easy to make - just boil up some water and put whatever you want into it! I'll have to do it when I get back to Australia, because it's piss-easy! Just need some way to keep a pot of water boiling on the table....

ANDREAS' FAREWELL

Andreas' farewell proceeded much as Ardan's did, actually. We started out at the Korean restaurant (mainly because nobody had any better ideas and it was the only solid suggestion we had), our party comprised of myself, Andreas, Malcolm, Sarah, Luca, and a Japanese guy whose name I've forgotten but who used to be Malcolm's roommate and is a very sweet guy and remembers all of our names even if we can't remember his (Andreas was calling him Kyoto). After Korean food we walked to the bowling place (after the taxi fiasco last time, we figured it was better to go the way we knew), drinking large hot bubble milk teas and talking about random things (an amusing point: Malcolm, Andreas and I argued for a moment about the time difference between China and Japan before we realized... there was a Japanese guy with us; also we talked about aliens finding Earth).

Bowling was fun as usual, I had a spectacular second game with 127 points! I took a photo of the scorecard, just so that nobody would think I was just making it up. Then we proceeded to KTV, karaoke, where I started looking at the English music choices from the other direction so we had plenty of new music. I'm not really sure, of course, what we're going to do next time, because we may have used up all the good English songs, but I guess we'll see. I am really enthusiastic about karaoke, which is more than slightly embarrassing, and there are some videos that Luca took with my own camera to prove it: there are stirring duets of me with Sarah and Andreas singing NSync and Michael Jackson, respectively. But you are never seeing them.

From KTV we adjourned after getting really confused about how much we needed to pay (I think the dude was trying to tell us we needed to buy the room for the rest of the night, but if Malcolm couldn't tell and he was sober, I had no chance of knowing), went back into the cool night and caught taxis to the Jazz Club. I may not have mentioned the Jazz Club, but I went there once before with Niki, Ardan, Sarah, and Luca after going to the Indian place and we met up with lots of kids from the Languages University, including another Belgian and and Australian from Cronulla (which upped my ocker accent by about ten notches).

This time, we got there after any hope of a live band, and there were only a couple of groups left in the bar. We played darts for a while, which is always fun with really drunk people because their scores are only ever as good as their eyesight, but thankfully there were no injuries. We moved onto pool quickly, though, after I had determined that it was, indeed, pool and not billiards (there was some confusion), and my team (Andreas, Malcolm and I) got absolutely trounced, though somehow I managed to get two balls in the pockets, so I was very happy with that, given my alcohol levels. Throw in some popcorn and very bored looking staff after everyone had left but us, and you have our stint at the Jazz Club.

Then we went to our favorite late-night city drunk food place, 烤肉 (meat sticks) in the Muslim quarter. We walked there, taking our time and I took some random pictures, we got a timed-camera snap of us all with the Bell Tower lit up in the background, and it was definitely time for food by the time we got there. I don't know how many meat sticks there were, but we got bread and rice too.

I was up till 5AM digesting it all (and the Tim Tam Slam that Andreas made me teach him how to do once we got back to the dormitory).

OTHER STUFF

During this time frame:

1) Participated in teachers' meetings which included: introducing Australian money, talking about my childhood and where I live in Australia now, taking part in some Chinese word games and answering lots of difficult grammar questions (as per usual).

2) Discovered my favorite Chinese TV show, which is called "Home With Kids" (家有儿女), and it's really great! I mean, it's just a silly television show about a family and their kids, but I find it interesting on a societal level as well. The thing is that it is touted as "an ideal family", in the ads for it, but the family has three kids. Obviously, to have an interesting show you need more than just a typical one-child family, so this one is comprised of a perfectly legitimate three-child family. How is this possible, with the one-child policy? Both parents were married before and brought in one child, and then bore their own. One of the children gets to see his other father, but in my time of watching I haven't seen the other mother.
It's also interesting because the father seems to sometimes work at home, taking care of the kids while the mother is at work as a nurse. The other parts are just obvious Chinese customs making themselves known: the kids are left alone if nobody is at home, the grandparents are very involved in their lives, two of the children are boys with an older sister. But for the most part it's just a regular show, of course: the kids fight, try and get back at each other, the parents have trouble controlling them and knowing how to punish them, the grandparents think they know best of all.... I really like it and wish I could find it on DVD but they're only on episode 17, so I don't think I'll be successful.

3) Played a lot of Katamari on PS2, which Luca has set up in Sarah's room. So much fun!

And so that's up to today! A very condensed version, of course, there are way more details than I have put here, but I'm sure this is enough to digest for now.

That's all for now; I promise not to leave it so long next time!

Semester's End remains copyright of the author alexifer, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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Anyway, then I got lazy and now it's nearly February, but here's my entry about Christmas and New Years, as summed up from my paper diary. Still to come: a basketball game, exam week, dinners with teachers from the English school, and another farewell to a German friend!

CHRISTMAS 2006!

We had a Christmas eve party at Niki's house, which was awesome loads of fun. I had been sick in bed the day before with food poisoning (my verdict on the culprit: dumplings from the night before, even though nobody else I ate with got sick), so it was a slow start for me, but I was feeling fine and the food was great and the company was even better, so it was all good! Twenty people turned up and I had orgnized some international Christmas music while Niki and Malcolm ordered a cake from Holliland cake shop (with the most massive dragon on it!) so it was all in all a great atmosphere.

The best part of the party was, however, the Secret Santa we put together! The way we organized it was that everyone would buy something random and non-gendered and at the party we brought them all together and then pulled names out of a hat. The name you pulled out was the person whose present you received and then that person got to pull a name out of the hat. It worked out really well, too! I'm sure most people thought about their presents like I did mine: that it was just something random and off-handed they didn't think too much about, but in the end it turns out that most people are really sweet and thoughtful and buy awesome presents even when they didn't know who it was going to!

There were some great gifts: Chinese "Monopoly" (in quotations because it was unofficial), cookies, chocolate, DVDs, incense, slippers and earmuffs, and metal puzzles. The metal puzzles were a big hit with everyone, and soon everyone was walking around trying to get metal puzzles apart and put them back together. Malcolm has some really funny photos I have yet to get from him (and his camera is broken for now so it'll be a while yet) of just about everyone at the party trying their hand at the puzzle. Somewhere after 10pm, once everyone had finally turned up and had some beer, we headed back out again to a club for some evening festivities.

It was a minor hassle getting 20+ people into taxis that would all end up at the same place, but we managed it, with a bit of a walk, and it was fun to see all the Chinese people celebrating as well. The city was absolutely buzzing with people, families and twenty-something partygoers alike, wearing Santa hats (some flashing, some with braids), waving neon things and noisemakers, firing off firecrackers, carrying sparklers. It was really interesting to note the difference between the way the Chinese celebrate and Westerners. I mean, we have out big parties with noise, but Christmas is... perhaps not a somber sort of holiday, but the idea is that you stay inside with your family and sing carols and keep to yourselves for the celebration. Chinese people get out there, walk around, and make lots of noise!

The club was your general nightclub fare, but it had a really amusing countdown to Christmas, sort of like at New Years. Nearing midnight, they had a singer up on a main platform near the dance floor, so Andreas dragged me down from our spot to watch his performance. Straight afterwards, the strangest thing happened. "Edelweiss" started playing over the loudspeakers, and about ten Chinese girls wearing long red dresses and carrying candles on their palms moved up onto the platform. They did a sort of slow dance to the song, waving the candles about, and then promptly stopped and a countdown from ten started. Firecrackers and sparklers went off at the end of the countdown, along with a loud techno version of Chinese "Jingle Bells" (which goes 'ding ding dang! ding ding dang!...' instead of jingle bells). It felt so much like New Years that Andreas decided a hug and a prompt "Happy Christmas" was in order.

Christmas day was great, I spent most of it on the phone with my parents, lounging around on the floor of my room (which I made more comfortable by spreading out my bed cover) and looking at my presents. One of them was the first season of the Jeeves and Wooster television series, which I promptly watched three of that evening. Other than a milk package unfortunately spilling all over my jeans, nothing else eventful happened on that day - definitely a nice, relaxing day after the Christmas eve party!

NEW YEARS

For New Years, we all gathered at Niki's place after coming from various things of our own for the evening. Niki had been stolen by her work for a mandatory celebration dinner (sounds like fun, no?), and Sarah and Luca were off doing their own thing, Andreas was spending the time in Xianyang county at a wedding party, and Malcolm and I went to the Indian restaurant near the Big Goose Pagoda (and ate way too much). With the exception of Andreas, of course, we all came together at Niki's house at around 10pm, along with a Kiwi friend of Niki's from work and her Chinese friend, and some beer, vodka, and a couple of hours later we rang in the New Year!

No resolutions, which was good, but at midnight we made New Years wishes. Mine were fairly tame: I wished to graduate, to travel around Australia more, and to continue with my Chinese studies even while I'm not at an institution studying it. Wishes sounded like a better idea than resolutions anyway, because there is always the chance that you'll break your resolutions, but it doesn't seem so bad if you just sort of don't get your wish, right? Maybe that's the wrong way of thinking about it, but resolutions always sounded so final to me, irreversible and sort of scary! Plus, whoever really keeps them? It's just upsetting in the end.

Niki headed out with her Kiwi friend after that, went to a club and the rest of our night at Niki's place was spent drinking and talking. Nothing in particular, of course, just random things and when there is enough alcohol you tend to forget things anyway; on New Years Day I tried to tell the a story about a cooking show I had watched earlier on New Years' Eve, but they stopped me halfway through and had to tell me I'd already told the story. This, of course, was the day after I had fallen asleep in the bathroom while the other were watching Queen of the Damned, after Niki had gotten back.

It was a fun evening though, despite being made fun of for falling asleep in the bathroom, and we all woke up after noon the next day as Malcolm cleaned up our mess (he is somewhat known for it, as he doesn't drink and always seems to be the one cleaning up drunk people's messes) and ate lunch at around three in the afternoon at the local North East cuisine restaurant - yum!

OTHER THINGS

During this time frame:

1) The first snow of the season came! I was attending class, and it lasted for about an hour in the morning. Nothing too spectacular, but it was the first (and only) snow I have seen in Xi'an, which is cause for happiness! I tried to take a video of it, but it was really so pathetic a snowfall that there doesn't seem to be anything on the screen!

2) We had a big party for all the foreigners at Jiaotong University, which really amounts for quite a few. We took up almost an entire hot pot restaurant, which was spectacular, and it was loads of fun! Not only were there the Chinese language students, but there is a big portion of foreigners studying regular undergraduate courses at the university - lots of courses are taught using English textbooks - so it was really an amazing turnout. Plus, who doesn't like to turn up for free hot pot and alcohol?

3) I saw a sheep being gutted on the side of the road one of the days as well, just after I'd eaten lunch with a Korean classmate of mine. It was lying on the ground, split open, and someone was just pulling bits out with his bare hands. Rather impressive! We stood around and watched for a while, and I have to admit to finding it quite fascinating, but it hasn't put me off my mutton so I'm thankful for that. It was being done just out front of our local noodle shop, and all I have to say is... well, at least we know the ingredients are fresh?

In the interest of not making each post too long, I will leave this one here and just continue on with the stories mentioned at the fore of this entry in another!

Christmas & New Years! remains copyright of the author alexifer, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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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.

Ardan's Last Days & Christmas Party: Part Two! remains copyright of the author alexifer, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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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!

Alex & Sam Do Xi'an! remains copyright of the author alexifer, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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Click here to get a selection of videos from my trip!

河南 Henan video update! remains copyright of the author alexifer, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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This day mainly consisted of waking up, packing, getting on a bus, getting on a train, meeting our tour guide, getting on another bus, having dinner, and then sleeping in our hotel room.

Some interesting but not very long-winded points of interest from this day:
1) The train trip was 8.3 hours long! I spent most of it reading a philosophy book the American guy in my class recommended to me called 生活的艺术 or, The Importance of Living, which I am not afraid to pass on the recommendation, even though I'm only about a fifth of the way through. And don't worry, I'm reading it in English.
2) One of the Korean students spent most of his time playing with his 气 qi, but before you think that sounds dirty I'll remind you all jovially that it's the internal energy all of us has. You can mold it into a ball and feel it if you're well-practiced enough, and the feeling is definitely real and you can even impose it on other people (I put my hand between the imaginary ball his was making and there was definitely a moment when I felt something!)
3) On the way out of the train station you have to present your tickets, but one of the Korean guys lost his! So he had to pay Y70 for the equivalent of a ticket back to Xi'an just to get out of the train station!
4) Spent most of the night sitting up with Niki and Malcolm (the Belgian guy, who had cut his hair the night before leaving - he used to have a ponytail and he shaved it all right down!) playing them music from my iPod and talking about other music with them. Malcolm has some really interesting tastes, he's into a lot of new-wave folk, alternative folk and antifolk... which you'd think would make him into the regular kind too, but apparently not! Though he does like 12th century French folk music....

Okay, so I try not to be long-winded, and look what happens.

DAY TWO

We set out at 8AM from our hotel to see the Henan Museum. Mostly when you go to museums in Australia there are lots of different sections of historical artifacts: there's the Egyptian room, the Pacific Islanders room, the Chinese room... not much from Australia but plenty from all over. Chinese museums, though, just have Chinese stuff, which is cool because there's plenty of history and it's all interesting, but after a while, every pot starts looking the same. There are always interesting objects you can't quite figure out, and I always like the pottery scenes of everyday life, but after a while even the signs start to look more interesting than pots. Some highlights were: the world's first seismograph, and a burial shroud made entirely out of jade.

Then it was time for lunch, and we set off again, this time to the Yellow River, one of the two most important rivers in China (the other being the Yangtse River, or 长江 Changjiang which is much more boring as "Long River").

The Yellow river is said to be the mother of China, but not, as you'd imagine, because it feeds the people of China. It's really a rather dirty river, so you wouldn't want to swim in it or drink from it (even though it is nice to look at), but it's the mother of China because about thirteen dynasties have had their capitals and/or other important cities along its banks.

The most interesting thing about the Yellow River, though, that we found was the elastic quality of its mud. After a protracted period of decision about who was coming along, we all trundled onto a hoverboat and made our way out to an island in the middle of the river. The island was basically a patch of mud that had been dried out, but as we found out, it was really quite malleable if you pounded hard enough on it. Apparently, the water and mud underneath bubbles up to the surface and you're able to walk on ground that isn't particularly steady - I've only been able to describe it as walking on a pool when a tarp has been pulled over the surface. Your footsteps make waves in the mud and you feel as though the ground beneath you isn't steady, but it's a lot of fun once you get used to the feeling.

Then we went to the top of a mountain that overlooked the Yellow River for a nice view, but the climb was very steep so by the time we got there we were utterly exhausted. On the whole, though, it was nice to be at such a picturesque peak when it was just about dusk, 4-5pm.

DAY THREE

The only thing we did on this day was go to see the famed 少林寺 Shaolin Monestary. During the course of a phone call to my parents, though, it seems that the Shaolin Monestary isn't really that famed after all. The basic run-down is, though, that back in the day, the dude who brought the Buddhist scriptures from India to China lived here. Somewhere along the way, or maybe before that, it was a place to learn martial arts, and the combination of Buddhist teachings and martial arts have strengthened his place's history and it's now considered probably the best school of martial arts in the world. You can most definitely get a better description over at Wikipedia (and it probably won't include the word "dude", either).

The first thing we did was catch the 10AM demonstration of some of the various types of martial arts taught at the Shaolin school. The most memorable of which was the animal gongfu (gongfu = kung fu, just as Beijing = Peking), where the fighting styles took on the various fighting behaviors of different animals. They demonstrated the scorpian, tiger, and praying mantis, but apparently there are many others, such as bulls and rabbits as well.... There were also people using their gathered strength to do incredible things: one guy had two steel spears sticking into his throat and he bent the wooden poles, another threw a pin through a sheet of glass to pop a balloon without breaking the glass, yet another broke iron sticks over his head.

Then we went on to the actual Shaolin Monestary, which was funny for Niki and I because we had just accidentally watched a TV show the night before, a period piece, that featured a big crowd of people storming the Shaolin monestary for one reason or another. Within the Shaolin monestary, our tour guide told us lots of stories, some of which I understood and some of which went over my head. It was a little tiring to hear so many stories in Chinese, but he was very patient with us and didn't fuss about repeating things, but he sometimes found it difficult to find simpler ways to say things.

One memorable myth was about a turtle-like creature, a descendant of the dragon, who was said to bring good luck. There were a few statues of these, and the story goes that if you touch its head, your life would know no worries, if you touch its neck, you'll never be sick, and if you touch its teeth, you'll be prosperous in the future. So of course, everyone went and touched each of these places, and they have done for so many years the stone is smooth. There was also the thousand year-old tree with no gender, the smallest cooking pot for Tang dynasty Shaolin students, and carvings of the Shaolin morning exercises.

But my favorite story explains the reason why Shaolin monks only bow with one hand beneath their chin instead of two pressed together. The story goes that Batuo (the dude with the Buddhist scriptures) came over from India will all this Buddhist knowledge to teach and help translate. When he arrived during the Northern Wei dynasty, he first had some questions and felt he wasn't entirely right in his understanding, so he went to the mountains for nine years (there's another story about leaving his impression on a rock that he sat against for nine years - if you're able to see his outline in the rock, you're more Buddhist than anyone else), while everyone started work on the translations. When he came back, there was another young man who wanted to become his apprentice. During the winter, when the grounds were covered with snow, this young man went to Batuo and said, "Will you teach me the way of the Buddha?" Batuo replied, "Only when the snow falls red will I teach you the way of the Buddha." So, the young man thought about it for a while. After a few days, he found the solution: he cut off his right arm and sprayed the snow of the ground with his blood, so that the entire courtyard of snow in front of Batuo's lodgings was red. Only then did Batuo consent to have the young man as his apprentice. So now, all the Shaolin monks bow with just one hand under their chin, signifying that their right arm has figuratively been cut off to learn the way of the Buddha.

Then there was the Pagoda Forest, which is the burial site of Shaolin's most famous monks. The levels of the pagoda indicate the ranking of the individual, and the highest pagoda was seven levels tall, reserved for a man who helped stem off a coup (or something - that story got a little lost in translation). The pagodas have little doors in them, where the ashes of the dead are put, and if the door is open, then it's a public grave (there was only one that we saw there). The children's grave was also public, there was only one of them, and it was very small and much less valued than the others, even the public grave. The oldest pagoda still standing was one from the Tang dynasty, and was built in 781AD. There was a new one, with interesting inscriptions and engravings on it - there were engravings of a television, computer, video camera, aeroplane, train, and a car on it. All the things needed for an enjoyable afterlife!

Then it was off to lunch, which was interesting because the place we had lunch was right next door to one of the other martial arts schools in the area, and the children were practicing just outside. After lunch we shopped a little with mean shop assistants who wouldn't let us haggle them down too much, and I was very frugal and only bought myself a t-shirt. Which, incidentally, I'm wearing right now! It's grey and has a picture of the Shaolin temple on the front, with the back describing all the different types of gongfu they teach at Shaolin. After lunch we attended one of those sales pitches for some Shaolin medicinal products, mostly hand creams and muscle ache remedies, all of which smelled like Tiger Balm, but the sales guy was pretty crazy! There was this one hand cream that helped with burns, so the guy got this red-hot metal chain, shoved his hand on it, showed us the burns, and then slathered his hand with the cream! I mean, talk about insane! About ten minutes later he washed it off and you couldn't see even a mark of the burn, which was pretty cool, but man. Talk about believing in the products you're hawking.

DAY FOUR

We woke up at 6:30AM on the last morning of our trip, in order to get in enough time at 龙门 Longmen before our train departed. The drive there was long, and mostly boring because we had to cut through a big industrial area, which all seemed to be deserted, even early in the morning, and by the time we got there we had napped off most of our early-morning blues. We were woken up even more by the freezing cold temperatures outside (it was 9C when we arrived and only 13C when we left), but it was all right once we started walking around.

Longmen is the site of many Buddhist carvings in little grottoes in the side of a mountain, along the banks of the 伊江 Yi River, dating back to the fifth century AD. There are nearly three thousand niches and caves, big and small, and nearly eleven thousand individually-carved Buddhist figures. Some of them are big, carved for people in particular, but there are lots and lots of smaller ones, no bigger than dolls, but the most impressive one was the Cave of Ten Thousand Buddhas. Here, the wall of the cave looks to be covered with little dots, but in fact they're all little Buddhas, no bigger than a couple of inches tall, and it was really impressive. Almost as impressive as the twenty-metre tall Buddha, the main attraction. We spent a happy fifteen minutes arranging (almost) everyone for a big group photo in front of the big Buddha.

After that, we just went to a jade shop, where half of the group stood around looking bored and the other half bought things, and I got in my obligatory fire hydrant photo (it seems that almost everyone has one of those "must-take" photos - Niki's is a photo of her with her foot sticking out, because her father can't seem to take a photo without doing that, sort of like Asian students can't help making the peace sign).

Then after lunch we took the train home, fought for a taxi that wouldn't charge us Y5 more than it was worth to get back to the university, and collapsed in our beds at around 10PM. Overall, an outstanding trip!

河南 Henan Province remains copyright of the author alexifer, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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Travel Photo Update remains copyright of the author alexifer, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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POINT TWO FOR AWESOMENESS, you won't remember a few entries back, but in Taiwan I was charged twice for a transaction when I couldn't find any banks that would give me any money at like 10PM in Xi Zhi? Well, I got a letter from my bank ages ago saying "we are on your case, it may take up to 45 days for things to be resolved" and then bang, this morning I find that EXACTLY 45 days after that letter was dated, my bank reimbursed me the money the Taiwanese bank charged for AND the $4AUD transaction fee. Which, in Chinese money, is close to two weeks' budgeting! So I am worry-free about my bicycle-buying and trip expenditures (which means I have to go to the bank tomorrow to take out more money - I meant to go today but I forgot my PIN, haha).

Other points are, I have a job teaching English to four kids (three of them are ten, one is twelve) for an hour and a half on Saturdays. I was a nervous wreck the first time last week, but I got on all right and we had fun and making the lesson plan for this week was a piece of cake! Y50 for the time, which is a crock of shit and I'm going to ask for more when I go to the teacher's meeting tomorrow (maybe. I could wimp out on that) but really, I don't mind it for the experience anyway. It's not too far, takes about an hour to get there on the (VERY CRAMPED) bus, but I might try taking my bike out there tomorrow, just to see how I go. But then, I might not, because the bus is so convenient, and it's only Y1, even if it is lung-crushingly packed. It makes the ride interesting, anyway!

I went to an Indian restaurant today, apparently the ONLY one in Xi'an (you'd have thought there'd be more!), and it was delicious. I hadn't realized how much I missed Indian food until I had the opportunity of eating it again, because I got really excited when it was suggested and I think the Palak Paneer was the best I've ever had... possibly because I haven't had it in so long. I also asked Niki about any Thai restaurants, which there are a few of, apparently, and I really want to check them out, because yay for having Pad Thai in various countries!

Also while out, I realized that October is nearly over. Niki is putting together a Halloween party, Godfather themed, and I realized that Halloween is NEXT WEEK. Like, to the day. And then she mentioned the school trip we're going on, and that's in TWO WEEKS. Where did all the time go! I'm not ready for it to be November! I barely got used to being here at all, how is it nearly November! And then, November is nearly December, nearly the end of the year, and then! Then it's only two months until I leave China and that wasn't nearly long enough at all! I won't want to leave, I can tell already, but at least now I KNOW I'll be back. Who knows when, but I'll be back.

And then, there is the HSK exam on December 6, which I plan to take but not study too hard for. It's apparently a ridiculously hard test, the listening section is as hard as we have for our class which I NEVER get unless I'm reading along, and there are ten levels and last year Niki got a level three. Still, I'll see where I am in December, and then maybe take it again next year.

Other interesting things, in point form!

- Bought a bootleg of The Departed, a movie that's out in America right now, and it was AMAZING, EVERYONE MUST SEE IT I EVEN SUGGEST SHELLING OUT MONEY TO DO SO! lmao watch as it's still in Australian theatres when I get back.

- More on the aforementioned school trip: We're off to Henan province, where the only thing I remember there being is the Shaolin temple. There are other things, of course, but I've forgotten what they are, and THE ENTIRE THING cost Y300, which is $50AUD. INSANITY, but the school subsidizes massively and makes short-term or scholarship students pay through the nose for it. Talk about amazing.

- I learned that you can buy a driver's license for like Y2000. I mean, there are technicalities about having to take a driving test, but Niki knows some French guys who have just bought the license and not had to take a test. Too bad I don't have Y2000 lying around because that would be awesome! Bypassing Ls & Ps, definitely worth Y2000!

- Need to buy more sheets. Not this week though, I feel bad about the expenses of bike and last week's paying for the school trip, but on November 15 they turn on the heating and apparently the radiators get everything dirty so I'll get some sheets to put over the radiator vent, and probably move my bed out a little. Also another set on top of that so I can change them every now and then! I am going to be taking home so much bedding, haha.

- It has been FREEZING here, and raining on and off for a couple of weeks. I think I will definitely need some more clothes for winter, just layers and things but I sort of feel bad not taking advantage of the crazy cheap clothes as well!

That's all for now!

My New Bike! remains copyright of the author alexifer, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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First up was Lin Tong museum, which was nice but it wasn't exactly a booming start to our trip. It was a museum that was basically a bunch of old pots and ceramic ware, bronzes and other sorts of artefacts, put into an old Buddhist monestary building. It was interesting, in that you got to see some museum-type things, and there was also a particularly interesting poster about the various corporal punishments in Han dynasty China, but other than that it felt a bit random.

Second up was the Hua Qing Hot Springs, the site of the springs from Li mountain, which is actually a dormant volcano (or, in our English tour guide's words, 'a hot mountain'). The water is around 80C underground, but by the time it comes up to the surface it's a lovely 43C, and we paid our Y.50 to wash our hands and faces in it - apparently, it makes you beautiful! There, we saw three old chambers from the Tang dynasty, during which the whole place was made. There was the first emperor's bath - which looked about the size of a swimming pool! - the seventh emperor's bath - slightly smaller - and the seventh emperor's famous concubine's pool. The seventh emperor's concubine was named Lady Yang, and she was famed for her beauty, which was said to be replenished constantly by the hot springs.

For a bit of a recent history lesson, Chiang Kai-Shek also had a field operations base at the Hua Qing Hot Springs, and it was also the site of what has now become called the Xi'an Incident. The story goes that the Communists and the Guomindang were both getting really scared of the Japanese threat to the country (as it was the 1930s and Japan was scary) and there was supposed to be some sort of unification between the two Chinese factions. However, the Communists say that Chiang Kai-Shek didn't want to agree to form a united front, and so they chased him out of his bedroom at Hua Qing and up the mountain.

So, following chronologically, after the Hot Springs we went up Li mountain to take a look at Chiang Kai-Shek's hide-out. The touristy things were only put up in the last six years, which is really interesting, and they now have a pavillion that tells the story of the Xi'an Incident, and also climbing ropes so that you can climb up the rocky side of the mountain and take a look at the little hole Chiang kept himself hidden in for the few hours it took for the Communists to find him. Sarah went up there, with rather more ease than any of the rest of us thought we could do, and said it was a tiny hole with a opening in the top. The rest of the tourist attractions included a "park", in which there were displayed some tanks and Jeeps, and also a plane, integral to the Xi'an Incident, and a nice stone mural that told the story in carvings. You could also take a picture with a Chiang Kai-Shek look-alike!

From there, we went to the Qin Shi Huang mausoleum, which was the first emperor of China, responsible for unifying China for the first time under one ruling after the Warring States Period. He's also the one responsible for the army of Terracotta Warriors, the site of which was only situated a few kilometres away. The mausoleum is a big mountain, which we were going to climb up but we were short on time, so just had a quick jaunt around the base and watched a performance that included various ceremonies that would have happened during the Qin dynasty: there were some offerings to gods, with one person dressed up as Qin Shi Huang; a dance by some ladies dressed in long flowing white dresses; some warrior-type dances, as well as some guards looking very intimidating. That was enjoyable enough, but there were a lot of moths and bees hovering around the flowers near us which was a little off-putting.

Lunch was interesting, if only for the fact that the restaurant we stopped at was behind the site of a wedding, which of course was filled with huge celebratory dances and lots of fireworks and everything. We couldn't see them from inside the building, but we could definitely hear them, and at one point they started playing the wedding march on their traditional instruments, it was pretty funny. It was also this point that I revealed how competent I was with my Chinese. There were a group of Australians on the tour as well, two of whom had been living in a city in the west working as teachers, and none of them spoke Chinese. I was there with Sarah, so I was really the only person who could speak Chinese amongst them, and I worked out our bills and everything because just waiting around for it was just getting too tedious. I don't mind being one of the foreigners and having an English-speaking tour guide and all, but when it's hindering our ability to eat or pay, then it just gets annoying. So I helped everyone out, and then they all knew I could speak Chinese - even if I'd told them before.

So then we went to the Terracotta Warriors - the entire point of us going on the trip! It's a huge complex with three pits of warriors, horses, generals, and archers. Pit #1 is the first one you go into, and the most famous. It looks like an aeroplane hangar, the curved rooftop and the wide open space, and it's large enough to fit planes in, but instead there is a large hole in the ground. At the front there are a few rows of repaired warriors and horses, and behind them are long aisles of warrior carnage. The way they were buried was in empty chambers, so due to the earth's natural movements over the last couple of thousand years, the statues were broken and buried with earth. The statues themselves are hollow all except for the legs, so they were particularly prone to breakages, so it's understandable. Still, there are lots of repaired ones, and they do an amazing job restoring them. One of the reasons they're not digging up any more is that the warriors are actually brightly colored and painted, and for the first few moments after being excavated, they retain their colors, but they quickly change into the dirty brown color after mixing with the atmosphere, so they don't want to dig up too many more before they figure out how to save that coloring.

Pits #2&3 are smaller and contain more carnage, which is really interesting as well. Pit #3 has a lot of the brick flooring in tact, and because they're smaller pits, you can see a lot of the details much better. They're just more of the same, though, really, and Pit #2 has some of the restored ones in glass cases where you could see them up close (one of them had the bright red on its armor, which was amazing). I remember this about last time I went to the Terracotta Warriors - just seeing them isn't really that spectacular. I mean, just the concept of them is amazing, and the actual reality of seeing them is sort of less impressive than the whole fact that they're there and what it means. Sort of like the pyramids? Though I've never seen them up close and imagine they're a bit more visually stunning.

And after that it was time to go home! There are lots of other things to see around Xi'an - I have still yet to go to the Hua Mountains, which I've heard are stunning - and I'll get around to them eventually, but this was one of those Xi'an Essential trips, something you have to do otherwise you just haven't been to Xi'an.

My Travellerspoint Photo Gallery has been updated with photos from the trip!

Xi'an Tourist Day Trip! remains copyright of the author alexifer, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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But, you know me. Let's start at the beginning.

I had originally intended to spend the week off (given for the National Day holiday October 1, and the Mid-Autumn festival, this year on October 6) with a friend from Sydney Uni who was working in Beijing, but those plans fell through on the Wednesday or so, and I made the rush decision to make plans to go to Gui Lin, which I'd heard of as being 1) one of China's most beautiful places, and 2) one of China's biggest tourist traps. It sounded like fun, so I enlisted the help of an English-speaking travel agent my friend Niki had dealt with before and caught the last tour group with space free, with a flight leaving at 9:30am on the Sunday (National Day) and returning on a 10:30pm flight on Wednesday. It was a rush decision but it was definitely worthwhile in the end.

Of course, it wasn't without its downsides, and the first of which was that I had to wake up at 5am to meet Steve (the travel agent) who took me to the airport shuttle in the city, and I got to the airport by about 7 - way too early for a domestic flight on a good day, and then there was the matter of the thick haze in Xi'an which meant the flight was delayed by two and a half hours.

This hanging around the airport wasn't without consequence, of course, the first of which was that I was noticed sitting alone by another tour group filled with what I can only assume were not city folk, who decided that I was terribly interesting and they all took photos of me with their kids. It was a little strange. Well, talking to me was all right, I can accept that even for city folk it's not every day you see a lone Westerner sitting in the airport looking bored, and certainly not one who can speak Chinese, or who studies in Xi'an, so that was all right. The photos with their kids was strange, though, and it's weird to think that these people are going to take the photos home and show people and I wonder what they'll say. "And this was the foreigner that we met at the airport..." - it seems bizarre to me.

Secondly, the travel agent (not Steve, a Mr. Wang I'd met when I picked up my tickets) hooked me up with three people who were in my tour group in Gui Lin. There were two men and a woman, who were all from the same 单位 (dan wei, a system of organizing people under the Communist party through their workplace, now more commonly just referring to one's place of work), and we chatted and they fed me dried fruit sticks and peanut/sesame bars which were absolutely delicious and filled me up after my lack of breakfast. It's hard to spend two and a half hours talking to people, though, and so I settled down with an awesome book my sister got me for my birthday and finished it to pass the time (thankfully I'd brought two books with me, though I didn't get very far into Fever Pitch).

Then, once we'd gotten to Gui Lin, the three people were sent to another hotel and I was left with a young couple who were staying at the same hotel as me, and we went out after settling into the hotel (at about 4pm, yes ELEVEN hours after I woke up). We walked around Gui Lin city, which isn't very big by Chinese standards - only 400,000+ people actually live there, most of whom I assume do so to serve the tourists which make up the rest of the floating population - and quickly found the Sun & Moon temples. We also found a large stall for a fancy brand of 白酒 (bai jiu, which is about 50% alcohol and the foulest thing I have ever tasted) and they had a look at it and while I was hanging around, the salespeople decided it would be great for PR if they got a photo of me trying some. So I obliged, but the stuff is really disgusting - the couple seemed more discerning, but I just said I wasn't used to alcohol that strong.

Other than that, we wandered around looking at shops and stalls and they took me to dinner (which I insisted upon paying my share of - they'd already bought me a drink and some meat-on-a-stick! The hospitality was overwhelming, really) and then helped me catch a taxi back to the hotel at around 8pm, because I was starting to feel really crap. I'd caught a cold, of course, and they helped me to find some medicine (which, not that I could read the ingredients, but to me seemed more health-related than drug-related) and I was starting to fade by 8pm. I spent the rest of the night in the hotel room watching a karaoke TV show, something that felt sort of like Idol but wasn't quite as polished.

The next morning there was a 6:50am wake-up call and we were out of the hotel and at our first destination by 9am (after visiting three hotels to pick up everyone - the first signs of disorganization). Our first destination was a five-hour cruise down the 漓江 (Li Jiang) river, which was fantastic. There I got acquainted with most of the other people on my tour, because once we went up onto the top deck to take photos they all seemed to want photos with the foreigner in their group. The most lasting friendship I made there was an English student about my age and her mother. They're all from Xi'an, so I've got the girl's number and we'll probably see each other again. The boat ride was fun aside from making new friends, the scenery was gorgeous, and the tourists many, so there was always plenty happening. Of course, after lunch was nap time and after that was karaoke time. And yep, you guessed it, the foreigner was nabbed for karaoke. I had no idea what to sing, so I just serenaded them with my horrible singing voice doing a rendition of the Australian national anthem.

After that, there was some mass confusion about what we were doing for the rest of the day. There was yelling, and the tour guide seemed to be apologizing at the same time as yelling back, but I had absolutely no idea what was going on. I asked the second tour guide, a boy about my age who seemed to naturally speak slowly which was great for me, and he explained that there was not enough tour buses to take us all to places we had picked out earlier (or, in my case, had someone pick out for me because I didn't know what they all were). So it's understandable everyone was getting angry, but I was all right with it because I had very few expectations anyway, so I just waited out the fighting and eventually we were taken to another place for an hour's ride down a smaller and shallower arm of the 漓江 river. I sat next to the woman I'd met at the airport, and she showed me pictures of her five year-old daughter (who was adorable!) and we talked generally about how lovely the area was. There were some mini-waterfalls that got my jeans wet but the water was nice and warm, so I didn't mind at all.

Next on our list was a minority village. The exact minority group it represented was lost in translation, but the whole village wasn't a real village, it was an entirely staged event to portray the minority as uncultured, childish people, and I didn't know what to make of it. I knew the place was fake, but I couldn't tell whether the behavior was entirely put on or not. I don't doubt that these people spoke the language they were speaking to each other, but I had my doubts as to whether they truly didn't speak any Mandarin Chinese. I mean, since the place was fake and this was just a job to them, they had to speak some so as to get on with their jobs. But it gave absolutely no insight into these people's everyday lives - just the lives the minority peoples probably lived years ago. I just don't know what the reality was - did these people go back to a little village approximating this, or did they go back to apartment buildings and televisions? Their behavior was even more confusing. We had been told beforehand that they were a boisterous lot, and it was true. They took your hand and touched you and stared at you (me more than anyone, obviously - I didn't see a single Westerner in the entire place) and bumped you with their bums, but I didn't know what to make of it. Was that all put on too? Or was it really how they acted with one another? I was inclined to believe the girls' behavior more than the boys', but mostly because they were less loud and didn't make advances to me in incredibly clear hand gestures (nothing rude, just pointing at me, pointing at himself, and then making a sleeping and kissing gesture. Still!). One of the girls did slap my ass though - it was dirty because I'd been sitting on the ground after being dragged into the middle of a performance, which I was so thankfully joined by Destiny, the English student.

Dinner that night was nothing special, but afterwards we went to a Miao minority performance on the Li river which was directed by 张艺谋 (Zhang Yi Mou), of Hero fame, which was spectacular. Most of the performance was on the river, boats and there was an amazing display where people on about ten rows of little bamboo boats manipulated these huge long streams of red fabric in waves. I've uploaded a video of some Miao girls in their traditional dress and silver adornments which you can download: here.

The second day was a bit of a rip-off. We went to five places that were pretty much entirely advertisements and excuses to buy things. Three were gem places (crystal, jade, and other gems), one seafood snack & health product place, and one coffee place. It was about the most bizarre thing I've ever experienced. For the crystal and seafood places, you went first into a room to hear a spiel about how awesome these things were, and with the others you were shown some examples and given some history on whatever it was, after which you were shunted into a big sales floor where you could buy to your heart's content. It was a colossal waste of time, but it did on the other hand give me time to talk more with Destiny, her mother, and the young tour guide, who were more than happy to teach me words (I learned how to explain what my parents do for livings, and also the words for 'crystal', 'Buddha', and 'Goddess of Mercy' - the latter two of which were relevant because they were common statues made out of crystal and jade). That was great, and it was about then that I really started to open up to the whole learning part of the trip, which was half the fun of it for me, really.

Other than advertisements, we went to a few parks, which are of course more spectacular than any other parks because in Gui Lin they're at the tops of mountains and have spectacular views of rivers and there are Buddhist carvings in the sides of caves. One of them had a zoo in it, which I visited with the young couple and managed to hold up the rest of the group because we were looking at animals. The main attraction was the panda, who was awake and eating at the time, but we also had a look at bears, a red panda, and some monkeys. It was actually quite upsetting, because they weren't exactly the best conditions for animals to be kept in (parts of the gibbons' cage was broken, the bear looked really frustrated in his tiny cage, and people were throwing food at the tiny baby chimp), but the young couple seemed to be happy with it and it just struck a strange chord, I suppose.

Another highlight was a visit to the Reed Flute Caves, which were huge underground crystal caves with some really impressive crystal formations, and also some amazing lighting stunts that just made the crystals so much more lively. However, I was put on edge the entire time by the lack of barriers and the fact people could (and children did) touch and climb over anything they wanted, with complete disregard for the crystals! I have to give some background history here, because if you haven't (or even if you have, I don't know) been to a crystal cave like this before, I went to the Jenolan Caves in the Blue Mountains just a week or so before I left for China, and it was very different. My dad and I went to the first cave walk of the day, and it was just a quiet and intimate setting with about fifteen of us walking through the caves with the guide, who was probably the reason for my discomfort in Gui Lin. He told us stories about how the crystals were formed, how long it took, and he stressed how you should never, under any circumstances, touch a crystal because it will be tainted by the oils and never be able to grow again. He also told us stories about how people and broken things just trying to steam-clean the caves from gases, and how they'd blasted through things just trying to get into the caves. So then to be at the Reed Flute Caves with a thousand other people, kids running around, people touching everything and dirtying up the crystals... it was just incredibly jarring. And even though I didn't say anything about the animals in cages to the young couple, I actually mentioned this discomfort to Destiny because I was so affected by it.

And that was about the last of it. I had another day there, as my flight left at 10:30pm, but that was filled sitting around talking to Destiny all day (I spent a happy half hour trying to explain Survivor in Chinese, and how it's interesting as a social experiment), which was really fun but it was like four hours of sitting around, so by the time they left to catch their train home, I went out and retraced the steps I'd taken with the young couple so I could peruse the markets and buy some things before I left. I made a couple of bargains, then nearly got lost on the way back, but made it back in time for the bus to take us to do more and more waiting. There was another contingent of Xi'an people getting back in on the same flight, and we all gabbed on for a bit (it was sometimes difficult, as they had very thick Shaanxi accents) and got on the plane, I caught the last airport shuttle bus back to the city, caught a taxi back, and finally got into my room again at 1:30am.
One of the most amusing strains in the conversations I had, though, was the fact that everyone was surprised that I was paying for all of this myself, and that I pay for half of my uni education, I buy my own clothes and all that, and they were even more stunned when I told them I knew people who lived away from home after they left high school. It's very much the custom here for children to be looked after until they're married, when they usually live with their parents anyway, and then they look after their parents when they get old. It was one of those moments, I guess, when something I'd only read about in class and heard about from people who'd been away from China for too long really came true for me. I could sort of believe it wasn't true, or at least they wouldn't be surprised that it went on, before I got here, but having conversations with several different people about it just confirmed the cliche, I guess.

So, all in all, I felt disoriented about it all for the most part, but once I started using my Chinese a lot more, it was fun and educational, and I got a lot more than just a vacation to see pretty scenery out of it.

桂林：一山， 一水， 一名城 remains copyright of the author alexifer, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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http://www.travellerspoint.com/photos/gallery/users/alexifer/

Since everyone has gotten used to seeing my pictures on Flickr, I won't use this new one very often - mostly only use it if I run out of room over there. But you can subscribe to this new one just like you've subscribed to this blog, so you can get updated when I put new photos over there.

Just your PDA for today, I'll update about that mysterious-sounding fitness video later...

Photo Update! remains copyright of the author alexifer, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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Now, I didn't really know anything about Macau before, and I have to say that I don't really know much more than before I left. I was totally baffled by the museum and the whole fact that I was entirely lost and had no grip on either of the two official languages (Cantonese and Portugese) meant that I pretty much spent the time following other tourists around so that I sort of looked like I knew what I was doing.

Frst of all, what I think Macau is about for Hong Kong residents is gambling. There are lots of huge glitzy casinos and waterfront properties and the big neon signs and the lot. But also, there's a bunch of history around. Basically, the Portuguese settled in Macau like ages ago, 1500s when they were still the kings of the water. So Macau is this weird mixture of Chinese traditions (Buddhist temples, modern Asian architecture with skyscrapers and air conditioning) and old-time European traditions (um, Portuguese architecture? Wide open plazas and Christian churches everywhere). It's pretty awesome, in that "what is going on here??" kind of way. You turn one way and there's a little pokey alley way that looks like it belongs in Beijing, and you turn another and there's another little alley that looks straight out of France or Italy! (I'm guessing it's probably pretty Portuguese as well...)

So anyway, you get to Macau via ferry. It's a wobbly ferry that takes an hour to get from Hong Kong, but I slept all the way through it both times. What I did see of it on the way in was nice: there are lots of little islands and sometimes, you see some that you think are untouched, perfectly clean of human touch or interference, and then around the corner is a ten-story slab of a resort along the beach front. But that's really all I saw of it because next thing I knew, I was out like a light. I turned up in Macau, following signs and still feeling rather lost, and picked up a few dozen leaflets at the tourist info booth.

Then into the arrivals hall at the wharf, and there were people offering taxi tours, pedicab tours, anything and everything and I actually went back inside so I could figure out which bus I wanted to take so I could just walk right past them. Which I did, and after much fiddling around I got on a bus into the city. It was actually quite difficult. Most things were in Chinese in big letters and then Portuguese in little ones, and of course all the script was traditional. On the bus they read out the stop name in Cantonese and Mandarin, and then English floated by on a sign unread. So, I got out when I thought I should, into this great big piazza with white painted buildings surrounding it. This was about when things started feeling bizarre: like parts of Europe had just been supplanted in Asia.

I walked around, there were a few tourist signs (but not quite so extensive as in Hong Kong), and the first thing I stumbled across was a church. It was quite pretty, the sort of thing you'd visit in Europe or maybe South America (I say this because of the climate, only it was in the middle of China. Then there were some more signs to the Ruins of St. Paul's Church, which is apparently one of the great symbols of Macau. It was the doorway to what I'm sure was once an incredible church. The plaques were all in Portuguese, though, so I didn't really understand. Then I followed some other tourists up to the museum but it seemed they didn't want to visit the museum so instead I took a turn around the gardens at the top, which looked to be an old fortress of some kind.

Let me just say here that it was HOT. Hot as hell, and no clouds or anything to cover it so it was just horrendeously hot and gross and I think I probably got a little bit of a sunburn in the process. So by the time I wandered down from the garden and tried to find (unsuccessfully) a cathedral that there were signs to, it was definitely time to cool off and have something to eat. It took me a while of walking up and down this one strip of a side-street to decide where to eat, and I'd walked back to the main piazza area before I realised that no, I was getting a headache and definitely needed to eat. I finally setlled on a set lunch menu at a french restaurant. Which wasn't anything really special, some soup and three meatballs (which doesn't sound like enough but was actually fine), and two glasses of Coke for like $18, which is all good by me really.

During lunch I decided that I should find something else to do, something else to find in Macau because it was silly to come all the way here and not see anything but the ruins and a garden. So I decided to find this Fora Garden place, because it had a cable car that shows off a view, and the buses ran straight from where I was and I could catch one in its loop all the way back to the ferry afterwards. It should not have been as much of an adventure as it ended up being.

I got on the #6 bus, and about two stops later, I realized that I was going the wrong way. But I didn't really know what to do about it! I didn't know where I was, and the bus was bleating at me in foreign languages, and I didn't really want to get off because it didn't look like tourist area anymore, so I decided to go to the end of the line. Surely there I could catch the same or a similar bus back to where I wanted to go originally! So after a forty-minute bus ride - which I have to admit was rather nice, driving through the side-streets of Macau that most tourists probably don't see because they take the right buses - I got off at the end of the line and there is nothing there, seriously. I was so frustrated by this point I thought it might be best just to turn around and go back to the ferry, but the bus that goes to the ferry left before I could wave it down. The next one that left went to Fora Park (finally!), but I couldn't fight my way through the bus to get off at the actual stop, so I had to backtrack from the stop after.

It was all right in the end, Fora Park. Not really something I'd have done every day in the middle of summer when all I want is a cool drink and no more walking thank you, but it was all right. I caught the cable car up to the top and wandered behind some other tourists, following a sign to the lighthouse. The park was rather nice, very shady and lots of trees, nice paths (though they were up hill to the lighthouse) and rather picturesque, as it was on top of the highest point in Macau. I followed the other tourists some more, through an old disused air raid shelter, because, well, why not! It was a little bizarre, a random air raid shelter on top of a mountain, and I couldn't find out why because it was all in Chinese and Portuguese. Thwarted again! However, it was very small, and a lovely shade of yellow. The lighthouse was also nice, and very picturesque on top of the mountain. There was a little church next to the lighthouse keeper's house, and it was all very nautical and had a spectacular view, but here I have to pause and tell another story.

Just before lunch, between coming down from the park at the top of the museum and failing to find the cathedeal, I'd gone into this little silkscreen painting exhibit, which was housed in an old 19th-century house that was influenced by both Chinese and Portuguese architecture. It was nice, but for some reason, the guard kept following me around. There were other people in the place, but he kept his eye on me, while I was taking photos and things. For a while I thought, maybe it was just this guard, he was just being weird and following me around, so I gave him a funny look and walked out pretty pointedly after that. However, it was not just this guard! There was another one at the lighthouse, in the church. There was some other random guy wandering around the place by himself, and a family, but the guard followed me wherever I went, just a few steps behind. I had no idea what was going on. What did they think I was going to do? I was just taking pictures, like everyone else!

Anyhow, I caught the bus back to the ferry after that, and that was kind of the end of my day. I got back to the hostel at about seven, took the MTR back, and ate my leftover California Pizza Kitchen pizza from the night before - yum!

The day I left for Xi'an was mostly spent online doing not much of anything, organizing photos and writing an email to the parents, and by the time all that was over it was time to go. I made a good trade, though! Me and this other guy from Melbourne were talking to this new British kid who had just arrived in Hong Kong, about all the things you can do in Hong Kong and our plans and, you know, general hostel talk. But since it was my last day, and I knew I wasn't coming back for a long time, I figured, why don't I give him my Octopus card (which you can use for MTR transit and also buying things at 7/11 and the supermarket)? It still had $50KHD on it, but I didn't need that much to get to the airport. And he was interested in Macau, so I also palmed off a few Macau patacas (just $8 in coins) and he was just so grateful! He'd noticed the Nick Hornby book on my bed and he handed over 31 Songs! So now, all I'm missing is Fever Pitch.

So that, my friends, was Hong Kong and Macau!

Macau! (and the end of HK) remains copyright of the author alexifer, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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