I Am The Passenger

大家好！

I spent the last four days doing some more exploring in and around Xi'an, this time with Thomas, who most of you will know as one of my awesome classmates from back in Leipzig. The reason for his coming was the APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) meeting that was held in Beijing this weekend. The government gave all students in Beijing six days of holidays, in an attempt to make the city less crowded and polluted. Whether if worked or not, I don't know. In any case, it was a great opportunity for the Beijing-ers to do some travelling.

Thomas arrived on Thursday at 8:30 in the morning. It was luckily pretty easy to spot him in the crowd coming out from the station, a foreigner in China just sticks out like a sore thumb. After him being awestruck by the sheer amount of open space that we have here in Xi'an, we went to check him into his hotel room. On Thursday we went to look at all the main attractions of the city centre, Bell tower, Drum tower, Great Mosque and Muslim quarter. We also found time to stop at a little bead shop. It is quite common to see this kind of shop at tourist attractions, they sell beads with Chinese characters on them. They just separate them by first letter and the customers have to look through the containers by themselves. It's easy to spend half an hour at this shop just looking for the characters in your name, because each container has about 200 different characters. We did find our respective Chinese names though and I now have an awesome bracelet.In the evening we rented bicycles to go around the city wall. The Xi'an city wall goes around the city centre in a square, it takes about 90 minutes to go around it by bike. Very fun, although painful.

A street in the Muslim quarter.

In the temple of the City God - five Confucian virtues - 信 trustworthy, 智 wise, 礼 proper etiquette, 义 just, 仁 humane. Some of these characters look different from the ones in the picture because the pictured characters are traditional ones and I can only type in simplified characters.

On the city wall. What do you think the black thing are? We were thinking eyebrows, but then the decision to put them below the face just seems strange.

The bell tower looking flawless as always.

On Friday we went to Xingqing Park, which you might remember as the location of my earlier photoshoot. This was the first time I went to the park in the morning, it was an amazing experience. Every square is filled with people doing some kind of activity. We were greeted by a group of about 100 elderly women (called 大妈, "big/great mother") dancing together. Behind them were couples doing the waltz and to the side some people were playing with Bailong Balls. While we drinking in the scenery, a painter sat down a few meters away from us and started sketching. He soon attracted a small crowd of spectators who began to advise him on how to make it look more like us. We purchased his drawing and went on exploring. The most impressive sight for me was a huge group of people who were gathered around a tree, singing together. They had an orchestra and a conductor and sounded pretty amazing.

The park choir.

After lunch it was time for me to prepare myself for the International Students' Speech Competition. An event that all Confucius Institute scholarship recipients were forced to participate in. We had to prepare a speech of four minutes and then recite it in front of an audience. The stuff of nightmares, basically. Even better, I was number 27 of 27, so I had almost 2 hours of sitting around and worrying to do before it was my turn. But finally I did my thing, it was fine, I won a backpack and the day was over. Almost. We decided to go see the Big Wild Goose Pagoda, which was sadly already closed. Our search for food then led us into an area where incredibly big shopping malls were being constructed, but which was almost abandoned by Chinese standards. Very few people on the street. So, after an hour of clueless walking around in disbelief, we went to 小寨, Xi'an's main shopping/eating district and had dinner there.

On Saturday it was time for Xi'an's main attraction, the Terracotta Warriors. Still as impressive as last week, although significantly colder. Afterwards we went to 华清池, hot springs close to Xi'an. It was beautiful there, we spent about half an hour warming our legs over the hot water. The place should also be of interest to the historians among you. Chiang Kai-shek resided here in 1936, during the Chinese Civil War. He was detained by two of his party's (Guomindang, Chinese Nationalist Party) marshals, who wanted to force him to form a united front with the Chinese Communist Party in order to fight the Japanese invasion. This event is known as the Xi'an Incident and is regarded as a major turning point in Chinese history. Hard to believe when one is walking through the beautiful scenery, that a kidnapping once took place here.

Main pit.

This is what the figures are thought to have looked like at the time of their creation.

Statue at the entrance to the hot springs. These are Emperor Xuanzong (Tang Dynasty) and his concubine Lady Yang, who bathed in the springs.

Me with the backpack that I won at the competition.

What a nice place to be detained in, don't you think?

The water is warm! Heaven on earth.

Sunday morning we had a bit of a different experience. We went to an orphanage in one of the villages surrounding Xi'an to teach English to the kids there. It was pretty crazy, teaching 25 children who are screaming at each other is quite a challenge. It was a great experience anyway and I will be going there again. There is a group of volunteers from my university who go to the orphanage every Sunday. Really admirable work. After getting back and having lunch we then went to 碑林, a collection of 3000 steles with Chinese texts carved into them. The most impressive part for me was the room with all the Confucian classics carved into stone. The easiest text to recognize was the Book of Changes 易经 because the hexagrams stick out. Also fairly easy to pick out was 论语, the Analects of Confucius, because as one of the guides put it, it's a lot of "The Master speaks, The Master speaks, The Master speaks..." (子曰，子曰，子曰).
The museum was very impressive, but I will have to go again with a Chinese guide, for more understanding. In the evening we went to a shop called 德国啤酒, German beer, which sold the most disappointing beer ever, and then had a great dinner with traditional Xi'an food.

Public toilet in the village.

This morning, we then had to get up at 6 and go to the train station. Danke Thomas! I had a great time showing my new home town to yet another visitor. Now normality returns to my weeks. Although, not quite yet! Tomorrow is 双11, the 11 November, also known as 光棍节 Singles' day. Mainly what happens is that all shops have crazy sales, kind of like Black Friday, only more Chinese. I will report more later.

For now, hugs and kisses from an increasingly cold and still not space-heated Xi'an.

Chinese Word of the Day: 退房 tuifang, check out. No explanation necessary.

Also, three pictures of oddities. The fact that they are all red is a coincidence by the way. Although I guess I am in China after all.

These are also sometimes pink. Although usually the translation is correct.

An actual phone to call the fire brigade.

Roses in November.