…about not posting again before I got back to Harbin. Picking up where we left off…

The nightmarket in Kaifeng was nothing to write home about, which is odd because Lonely Planet was very excited about it. My guess is that it’s more active in the summer and generally anytime it isn’t snowing, but still, disappointing. I did get some kind of fried egg thing, though, so I didn’t have to go to KFC again.

Yesterday, I got up, checked out of my crap hotel, and headed back to Zhengzhou, my present location, by way of bus and a couple cabs. The hotel in Zhengzhou is nice, although it occured to me last night that my idea of “nice” is pretty forgiving. Does the room have hot water? A shower? A toilet? As long as it does and there aren’t also strangers living in it, it’s nice, despite evident burn marks on the wall and my realization that the facilities I’m so impressed by come standard at Motel 6. Anyway, I’m enjoying it.

I took a shower (crap hotel in Kaifeng had no shower facilities), a nap, and then set out in search of a supermarket or convenience store, a search that was doomed to failure. It was also raining so, sans umbrella, I gave up after a while and went back to my room, where I took a bath (why not) and watched some Chinese TV shows (including one apparently filmed in Harbin) and a dubbed version of Antoine Fisher on TV (surprisingly, pretty good. I’ve never seen it in English, but it seems like the sort of movie you’d think wouldn’t work well dubbed into a different language).

This morning I was woken by the “bells” (i.e. tape recorded) in the nearby pagoda blaring the refrain of a classic patriotic tune before announcing that it was 9:00. I caught a bit of another movie on TV (some movie where Leonardo DiCaprio lies a lot?), then headed out to the Henan Provincial Museum.

Like the Shanxi History Museum, it was surprisingly free, but the reason appears to be that most of the exhibits are currently closed. There were basically only two rooms to explore, but luckily, there was some pretty amazing stuff in those rooms. I did indeed see some oracle bones (cracked turtle shells that contain the first traces of writing, some 9000 years old), Shang dynasty bronzes and pottery (if you think Ming vases are valuable, try the ones that are 4000 years older), and some pretty intricate jade carving, as well as some pieces from tombs I studied in school. Unfortunately, since there were only two rooms, that took less than an hour. My flight doesn’t leave till Sunday and I’ve now basically seen everything I wanted to see.

I went back to the hotel and, after inquiring at the front desk, found a supermarket that will provide me with delicious foodstuffs later tonight. Having found it, I wandered east in the direction of a Daoist temple (Ming dynasty, reconstructed), and found it a half hour later.

It was small, and generally pretty unremarkable save the curator who wanted me to give him 400 RMB for him to give to “the gods” to ensure my good health. Needless to say, I declined, noting that if I were concerned for my health I’d see a doctor, and reflecting that it’s really no wonder the CCP has taken the attitude it has toward religion. People like to talk about how they are threatened by it — threatened by any large organization that might rival them — and there may be some truth to that, but that sort of “religion” (giving money for health/whatever) is common in folk religions/daoism and some kinds of Buddhism as well. It strikes me as not particularly good for “the people”. On the sheet the guy was trying to get me to sign, there were lots of other names with large sums next to them, 600 RMB, 800 RMB. These are huge sums for the average Chinese person, and since most wealthy Chinese don’t believe in that kind of “superstition”, I suspect most of those donations were made by lower class people who could be spending that money on their kids or something.

Of course, in America, people have the freedom to throw their money away on religious nonsense, as they do in China. Still, it’s not that difficult to understand why the Party would be opposed to it for legitimate reasons having to do with the welfare of the people. Not everything they do is self-servingly evil.

Anyway, I’m pretty sure Laozi, Zhuangzi, the Buddha, etc., would not approve of this sort of “worship” (or any kind for that matter), just as Jesus would probably balk at many of the things done in his name. Once again, we see that people are the same everywhere.

MASS TRANSPORTATION STATS:
Planes taken: 1
Buses taken: 14
Trains taken: 1
Cabs taken: 23
Private vehicles taken: 3

I live!

Picking up where we left off, I woke up the next morning and caught a bus to Luoyang, during which I was able to catch most of the on-bus feature, Turbulence 2: Fear of Flying. If you haven’t seen it, it’s basically Snakes on a Plane, only without the snakes or Samuel L. Jackson (i.e., it’s terrible).

As soon as we got to Luoyang, the place gave me a bad feeling. I’m not really sure why, although part of it was certainly that it’s clearly not as developed a city as any of the ones I’ve visited before. Everything was smaller, dirtier, louder, and generally less attractive. On my walk from the bus station to the hotel I saw several people sitting in shops that appeared to be selling only rocks.

The hotel was fairly cheap, and they put me up in a regular double for the price of dorm housing on the condition that they might give me a roommate if someone showed up. The toilet only kind of worked, and the shower was unusable so I took several baths, but it had a TV and heating, at least, to complement the perpetual construction going on right outside the door.

My first night in Luoyang, I decided to go to the “Old City” section, which has a night market and some leftovers from Luoyang’s days as a capitol. The ancient holdovers were few and far between, and the walk was way longer than I thought it would be, but I ate some delicious street food in the night market and a local hole-in-the-wall before cabbing it back home for the night.

The next day, I took a cab (foolish!) to the Longmen Caves, which are not as close as I thought they were. Having spent as much on the cab as I was spending on my lodgings (50 RMB), I headed into the park.

The Longmen Caves are a series of grottoes with Buddhist carvings dating from the 6th century A.D. They are recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and did not dissapoint. A half-mile or so (rough guess) of cliff face along a river is hollowed out with several large caves and hundreds of smaller ones, all containing statues and carvings of Buddhas, bodhisattvas, arhats, etc. Some of the statues have had their faces scratched off (defacement from the Cultural Revolution), others have had their heads stolen (by European “archaeologists” in the early 20th century). Two whole walls are also missing (one’s in England, the other’s in Kansas).

Still, what’s left is extremely impressive. The showstopper is a 30m tall Buddha whose face is supposedly modelled after Wu Zetian’s (China’s first, and only, female emperor). You would think that after seeing the world’s largest Buddha, smaller Buddhas would be less impressive, but it turns out that no, they are not. My only complaints about the Longmen Caves were that it was very cold, with a bitter wind rushing over the river and freezing my batteries while I was trying to take pictures.

I returned the hotel room by bus (1.5 RMB) and took a bath to warm up while my camera recharged. Shortly after that, a roommate showed up: a 20-something British girl who had been traveling in Asia for 5 months. We chatted for a bit and then went out for something to eat. Still getting a vibe of evil from Luoyang and having seen the one thing I really wanted to see there (Longmen) I decided to blow off the White Horse Temple and head to Zhengzhou the next morning via the Shaolin Temple.

I didn’t know where to go to get a bus to the Shaolin temple, but conveniently some guy who runs one happened to be standing in the lobby as I was checking out, and the price he offered was shockingly reasonable, so I hopped on.

As it turned out, this was a tourist bus, so along the way we visited some other sites, including the Buddhist monk Xuanzang’s home and burial site (he’s the monk who went to India and who Journey to the West is based on, the Big Goose Pagoda I visted in Xi’an is also dedicated to him) and an interesting school and temple on the same mountain as the Shaolin Temple. On the way, we also passed the White Horse Temple I had decided to blow off visiting, and I immediately stopped regretting my decision as the temple’s pagoda was shrouded in green plastic and scaffolding.

The Shaolin Temple itself was an interesting experience. Kung Fu fans the world over revere it as the sacred birthplace of their art, and it is a tourist mecca. Our tickets included a performance by some of the students who lived and study on-site (there are thousands of them), which was interesting if a bit generic. Then it was on to the real deal, the temple itself, and its attendant “pagoda forest”.

Although we had a guide (Chinese), I opted to spend most of my time in the Shaolin Temple listening to the Wu Tang Clan’s seminal 36 Chambers album, for reasons that should be apparent to anyone familiar with Wu Tang. It was a strange experience, but one I won’t soon forget. The temple itself was beautiful, if fairly small and not particularly old (it tends to get burned down and rebuilt a lot, apparently) — it didn’t seem any more or less related to Kung Fu than any of the other temples I’ve been to, but it was cool.

The real reason to visit, though, is the pagoda forest, which is basically just what it sounds like: a vertiable forest of smallish pagodas, nearly all of which are built in memory of deceased masters from the Shaolin Temple. It’s quite arresting, and if my fucking camera hadn’t been pretending it was out of battery (this happens when its cold) I would have gotten some pictures. As it was, I took some video of it until I ran out of video tape, at which point my video camera also broke (same exact way as before, which leads me to believe it will be another cheap fix, but still…goddamn it).

After the pagoda forest I hopped a bus to Zhengzhou and opted to stay there for the night as it was already evening when we arrived. I wandered the city a bit, finding it infinitely preferable to Luoyang, before running into the hotel I was looking for somewhat by accident. It cost a pretty penny — no dorm rooms here — but it was probably worth it. No roomates, working facilities, and very close to a night market where I ate some freakin’ delicious food (beef and small noodles fried in sauce and wrapped in fried thin pancake-like bread) that night for about 2 RMB.

The next day, I set out for Kaifeng, the last “real” stop on my trip, by bus. A scant hour later I was here in Kaifeng, the ancient “Eastern capitol”, meaning that I have now visited all the ancient capitols but one (Beijing is the Northern Capitol, Xi’an the Western, Luoyang the “Middle”, Kaifeng the Eastern, and Nanjing, which I haven’t visited, the Southern Capitol).

It was raining — a boon for the farmers of Henan who have been suffering through severe drought these past few months, but a bane to a tourist who wants to visit mostly outdoor temples — so I went straight to the hotel and checked into my crappy, bathroom-less room before heading out to check out the local nightmarket.

Unfortunately, the local nightmarket apparently fears rain, so I ate at KFC and spent the rest of the night in my hotel room bored out of my skull.

A closer examination of Lonely Planet revealed two main things to see in Kaifeng, the Temple of the Chief Minister and the Shan-Shan-Gan Guild Hall, so I woke up this morning (thanks, singing guy next door!) and set out by foot to find them.

The Temple of the Chief Minister was nice, essentially a by-the-books Buddhist temple save an octagonal chamber containing a Guanyin (I think it was Guanyin) with 1000 arms and 1000 eyes. It was full of old Buddhist women wielding flaming incense as though no one else was around, and I’m amazed it hasn’t burned down. I spent about half an hour there and then moved on to the bakery across the street, which sold me delicious bread. Then I went on to the Shan-Shan-Gan Guild Hall.

The Guild Hall was small, but full of the kind of interesting details I would never pay attention to if the tour guide hadn’t badgered me into purchasing her services. The tour was in Chinese, but it only cost 10 RMB and was probably worth it, as I learned lots of interesting things about the carving details in the decorations under the roofs; in short, EVERYTHING is significant and has some meaning in addition to its aesthetic value. The place was more or less deserted, and actually quite beautiful although it’s really just one courtyard and hall, it was aesthetically one my favorite places on the trip.

It was also the last thing I really felt the need to see in Kaifeng, save the nightmarket. There are some pagodas, but I’ve seen my fill of those, and many of the other sights are parks and lakes, not a ton of fun when it’s freezing out and all the trees are dead.

I’m hanging out in Kaifeng for tonight to take another shot at seeing the nightmarket before returning to Zhengzhou tomorrow. There’s really only one thing to see there — a musuem that promises to show me oracle bones, among other ancient things — but the hotel is nice, I can afford it, and my flight leaves from there on Sunday so I’m just going to hang out, eat street food, and see my one sight at a leisurely pace. I probably won’t bother to post again until after I’m back in Harbin on Sunday, at which point I’ll be able to provide some photographs and more cool stats. Video will also be forthcoming, including cute panda video, but that will take longer as I’ll need to get my camera repaired again before I can load the video onto my computer.

MASS TRANSPORTATION STATS:
Planes taken: 1
Buses taken: 13
Trains taken: 1
Cabs taken: 19
Private vehicles taken: 3

Today was, by far, my least successful day so far this trip. That’s not to say it’s been bad, just that things didn’t work out quite as planned.

I had planned to go first to a Daoist temple called the temple of the Eight Immortals slightly outside the walled city’s east gate. It took me about twenty minutes to walk there, and another twenty or so to walk around the area and realize I couldn’t find it. I did find a very small temple with a different name that’s probably where I was meant to go, but at the time I passed it I was thrown off by the name thing and by the time I had given up on finding the temple anywhere else I didn’t really feel like going back. I have seen, and will see, better temples anyway.

So I headed back into the city and toward the south gate, where the Forest of Stelae Museum is. According to Lonely Planet, there is a Nestorian Tablet there that’s the first evidence of Christianity in China, but I’ll be damned if I can find it. It’s not a big place or anything, and I checked all the rooms pretty thoroughly–nothing.

It wasn’t a total waste, though. The museum’s architecture and landscaping is quite serene (the museum itself is nearly 1000 years old), and they have an impressive sculpture garden as well as giant steles with copies of all the Confucian classics, copied down over a millenium ago. The sculptures, especially, were worth seeing as all of them were quite old and also impressive. They also had some pieces from Han tombs (tomb entrance, coffin, etc.) that were of particular interest to me because of my previous study of Han archaeology and beliefs about death.

I left the museum and headed back towards the Muslim quarter in search of some street food, winding through a long “culture” street full of people selling calligraphy brushes, paintings, calligraphy scrolls, and anything else tangentially related to the museum’s wares. It’s actually sort of a cool atmosphere, and though I didn’t buy anything — the last thing I need is more Chinese art — it was fun to stroll through.

The Muslim street was also fun, although I didn’t end up buying anything, opting instead for some mooncake-like pastries from a vendor who sets up across the street from the hostel and who I met a few days ago. When he saw me today, he said, “Ah, our friend from Harbin is back,” which I thought was nice. Then I came back to the hostel to figure out my travel plans for tomorrow, take a shower, and rest so that I can walk back to the drum and bell towers tonight after dark to get some photos of them lit up.

I also figured using the map in Lonely Planet (so, very rough estimation) that I walk about ten miles a day here.

Anyway, tomorrow morning I will arise early and head to the bus station to catch the 4-hour ride to Luoyang. Once I get there, I’ll walk to the hotel and (hopefully) book a room and ditch my backpack, then depending on my energy levels either head into the Old City on foot to check it out, or catch a bus to a temple outside the city. Expect less frequent updates from Luoyang if, as Lonely Planet reports, internet access at the hotel really costs 10 RMB/hour. It costs 5 RMB here, and even that is too much.

MASS TRANSPORTATION STATS:
Planes taken: 1
Buses taken: 8
Trains taken: 1
Cabs taken: 14
Private vehicles taken: 2

(Two full days of straight walking).

This morning at the crack of 10:30 I hauled myself out of bed for another long hike. Having everything in walking distance in Xi’an has allowed me to save lots of money. I haven’t paid for a cab once since I got here, but then again, I probably walk ten miles every day. Good exercise, I guess.

It took about an hour and a half to get to the 陕西 Shaanxi (not a typo, the double a is to distinguish it from 山西 Shanxi, another province with the same pinyin spelling but a different tone for the “shan” syllable) History Museum, which is housed in a large building meant to look like an ancient palace, or something. It was also, to my surprise, free as long as you have any form of ID, which made me quite happy given that Lonely Planet said it cost 30 RMB and, like I mentioned before, most prices have gone up since the publication of that book.

Shaanxi is the “heart” of China, and much of early Chinese civlization was centered here, even before the famed first emperor made Xi’an (then called Chang’an) his capitol. The museum starts with a proto-human skull from the region that’s over a million years old and goes from there all the way through the Shang and Zhou Dynasties, the Warring States Period, and then the Qin-Tang Dynasties, so essentially nonstop from 5,000 B.C. (if we’re not counting the proto-human skull) through 700 or so A.D.

For a Chinese museum it’s actually remarkably well done. Everything has very readable (if not perfect) English translations, the museum is clean and classy, and occasionally, a very well-made and informative film plays on a giant plasma screen to add context and depth to the pieces. Adding to the fun is that almost none of the stuff is fake, and when it is, they always note that it’s a reproduction, so when they tell you you’re looking at a 4000 year-old Shang pottery vessel, you can be reasonably certain you actually are.

As you can guess, I enjoyed the museum quite a bit, although I also discovered that touring China has given me ridiculous standards for “history” when I entered the Han Dynasty (which started around 200 BC) exhibition and found myself thinking, “Boring, this stuff isn’t even old.” It’s all pretty impressive though. By the Tang Dynasty stuff (around 700 A.D.), a lot of the worksmanship looks pretty much like what we might be able to make today, and the colors are remarkably vivid on some of the pieces even after years of aging in tombs.

After that I walked back towards the city and to the Drum Tower, which is also the entrance to the city’s Muslim district. North of the tower (which itself is pretty much like the drum towers in every ancient Chinese city) there’s a vibrant tangle of narrow alleys packed with streetside food vendors selling Muslim specialties, and cheap knockoff versions of almost any kind of China souvenir you can imagine, moving quickly off the tables and into the hands of the crowd of tourists (even now, this place was pretty crowded, whereas most places I have been are virtually deserted). Being fairly starving, I bought a circular bread thing that was hot, covered in sesame seeds, and seemed to have garlic and maybe some other spices baked in. I have no idea what it was, but it was pretty delicious. Then I headed to the Great Mosque, one of the oldest and most famous Mosques in China.

The whole thing is set up architecturally just like a Chinese Buddhist or Daoist temple, and if it weren’t for the telltale arabic inscriptions and the bearded men wandering the grounds, you might mistake it for one, at least until you got to the prayer hall. The prayer hall isn’t actually open to non-Muslims, but they do keep the doors open when they aren’t using it so that you can peep in and have a bit of a look. It’s a fairly short experience, consisting of only four small courtyards, but it was worth seeing just in that it’s something different from the Buddhist and Daoist temples I’ve been seeing and will be continuing to see.

After a while, I went back out onto the street and bought some dried kiwi (good!) from one of the six hundred or so street vendors selling it, then wandered back to the front of the bell tower to eat some of it while watching a little Chinese kid practice his kung fu moves while his mother looked on nervously, repeatedly reminding him not to run. Then I came back the hostel and bought some things I needed, like batteries, at nearby shops.

I need batteries because my camera is being tempermental about them. I don’t know if it’s the crap Chinese camera itself or the crap Chinese batteries, but they last me about 12 seconds, which is extremely frustrating. I bought 8 today, my guess is they will get me through tomorrow, maybe. When I put the first two in and turn the camera on to check, the first thing it did was say “low battery” and turn off. (When I turned it on again, it worked).

My video camera is running low too, because my charger can’t just be plugged into any outlet and hostels don’t tend to provide tons of options for that sort of thing. I’ve been trying to use it sparingly anyway because I don’t want to get back and have 4 hours of HD footage (i.e., like a billion gigabytes) on my harddrive. My general policy is to only videotape things that are uncapturable on regular film, i.e. things that move or scenes that benefit from panning/zooming. I’ve already got about 40 minutes of footage, I think, and god knows how many photos (I’d guess around 400, but I’ll have final stats for everything once I get back in a little over a week).

Anyway, one more day in Xi’an, then it’s off to Luoyang and the beginning of my tri-city sprint to the finish.

MASS TRANSPORTATION STATS:
Planes taken: 1
Buses taken: 8
Trains taken: 1
Cabs taken: 14
Private vehicles taken: 2

(That’s right baby, today was 100% walking).

First off, I forgot to mention in my last post that on the way to that Sichuan restaurant, I was also propositioned by a prostitute. Oh yeah. I mean, there’s no way to be sure, but it was a dimly lit street at night and a single woman was just standing out there, asking if I wanted a “massage”. I know what that means. (Obviously, I declined the offer. I don’t really want my souvenir from Xi’an to be AIDS).

Immediately following the writing of my last post, I moved to the bar and, for lack of anything better to do, ordered a beer. The bartender, a woman about my age, was impressed with my Chinese and we ended up getting into an extended conversation about a number of things, including English teaching. She’s also an English teacher with very young students on the weekends, so we ended up comparing notes, sharing some games, and commiserating.

Then a friend of hers showed up at the bar and so I started to chat with the two of them. Quickly, I learned that the guy is one of those computer badasses China is famous for; he’s a hacker who now runs his own computer security company, but also participates in hacker conferences and stuff. He’s also written a lengthy book in Chinese about something computer related (that’s about as much as I understood, my guess is I wouldn’t have understood much more if it had been in English).

We got around to discussing video games and, as happens, ended up more or less ignoring his poor friend while gushing about our favorite games and the way gaming has changed over the past decade. An insight into the way Chinese high school works: it took the poor guy a year to work through Half Life (not sure if he meant the original or 2) because he was playing it while in high school, and so busy that he could only sneak in a few minutes during his lunch break every day.

Anyway, I eventually retired and got up the next day to meet up with Danielle and check out the City Walls. They surround the inner part of Xi’an, and were originally built in the Ming Dynasty. (However, during the much earlier Tang Dynasty, the walled portion of the city was something like 14 times bigger! The Tang walls were later destroyed by invaders though). We climbed up by the South gate and rented bikes so that we could circumnavigate the walls, which are pretty much totally intact.

All in all, it took us about an hour and a half to make our way around the walls. Most of the time, we were the only people up there, which was pretty cool, and they afforded some impressive views of the surrounding city. The sun even came out briefly at one point; to date that’s still the only time I’ve seen the sun here in Xi’an.

After that, we walked to the Little Goose Pagoda, but opted not to go in because the tickets were 50 freakin’ RMB. This has been a recurring theme; the Lonely Planet I have is a year old and the prices in it might be older, but almost everything I have been to has been significantly (as in double, triple, quaruple…) more than I expected. Anyway, the Big Goose Pagoda is the more famous one, so we opted to head there instead. We stopped off along the way at a hole-in-the-wall Sichuan place for some food, which was pretty good, and extremly cheap.

The Big Goose Pagoda (and accompanying temple) are surrounded by lots of tourist stuff. Like everywhere in Xi’an, one can buy replicas of the Terra Cotta Warriors in bulk if needed. You can also pay to get your photo taken in Tang dynasty costumes; I have not yet done anything this ridiculous, but I still might. Anyway, the temple itself was nice, if small. It was founded by Xuanzang, the monk who inspired the famous Chinese novel Journey to the West by, well, journeying to the west (India) to get Buddhist scriptures. He collected a ton of them, brought them back to China, and translated them so well that his translations are still sometimes used today (over 1000 years later).

As it turns out, walking around with a blond white girl attracts even more attention than walking around myself. Twice we were asked by random strangers if they could take pictures with us, and this time I got them to take one with my camera too, so when I get back to Harbin you can see a picture of Danielle and I with some random Chinese old people. Plus a pagoda in the backround that’s over a thousand years old!

After the pagoda, we walked back to the hostel, which took a while. We had dinner in the restaurant there, then Danielle and her mother left for the train to Beijing and I went back to my room to plan out the next few days.

In the room, I met some other people though. Americans! Two of them! One is even from Boston, and has been to Providence before, which meant that we could walk down the streets of Xi’an at night talking about Thayer Street. That was cool. We went out to buy some beer, and ended up in another Sichuan place drinking and chatting until 11 or so, at which point we returned to the hostel so that we could get up today to go to the tomb of Emperor Jingdi.

Getting there proved difficult. Lonely Planet warned us of this, but it also told us about a bus that didn’t actually exist. After searching for that for a while and discovering it to be a lie, we started asking around and eventually got sent walking back in the direction we came. About an hour after we left the hostel, we finally caught a bus at a place that’s about a ten minute walk from our doorstep. Oh well.

The tomb itself is separated into two sections, a museum, and an “underground museum” where you can look at lots of the tomb objects in situ. We went to the regular museum first.

Emperor Jingdi, in total contrast to the first emperor, was universally beloved. He was a Daoist who attempted to rule through wu-wei, and his reign is considered to be the high point of the Han dynasty. His tomb was full of terra cotta figures too, although they were not life size, and these figures reflected the contrast between him and the Qin Emperor. Where Qin Shihuang filled his tomb with armies, Jingdi filled his with servants, women, livestock, ritual vessels, and even clayware, smaller versions of stoves and cooking ranges. While his figures are significantly smaller than the Terra Cotta Warriors (they’re about 2 feet high), there were tons of them, and they were also painted and clothed in silk (long since rotted away).

The regular museum shows you examples of everything, but the real attraction is the underground museum, which they have built over 10ish burial pits that you can examine closely from multiple angles thanks to glass floors and walls. To even get to the museum you walk past rows and rows of unexcavated pits, and looking at the hundreds of figures on-site, it’s clear that Jingdi’s tomb was no less a massive undertaking than the First Emperor’s. There are rows and rows of servants (both eunichs and regular ones), and one pit has an impressively long lineup of livestock: cattle, pigs, dogs, horses, etc. Everything is equisitely carved, and some of the figures indicate that Jingdi also allowed women to serve in the military (there were some soldiers among his burial figures, of course). I’d studied the site in class before, so actually being there and seeing it was pretty cool.

What was less cool was how we had to wait two hours for the bus to take us back to the city. No one is exactly clear on why, since they’re supposed to come every half hour, but the three of us and a handful of exasperated Chinese visitors waited in the cold for about 45 minutes, and then inside the lobby of the museum for another 20 before the bus showed up. They wouldn’t let us on it, though, they just parked it in a corner and made us wait for another hour or so before they finally headed back.

There was no food at the site, so by the time we got home I was virtually starving. I got a Pepsi and some crap Chinese cookies from a conveniene store, and then some mooncake-like things from a roadside stall down the road. The people there were also impressed with my Chinese and, like everyone I meet, full of questions about Harbin, which begin with “Isn’t it, like, really cold?”, and cover such diverse topics as “And there’s an ice festival?” before returning to the more familiar ground of “So it’s cold, then?”

It’s actually not warm here, although it’s apparently warm enough to rain. I’ll refrain from commenting on the city or its weather until I’m done here (I’ve still got another two days), but it’s been gray so far.

Tomorrow and the next day should be pretty relaxing, I plan to see two sites a day and all of them are within walking distance, so I don’t have to deal with buses or even taxis if I don’t feel like it. The planned itinterary: the provincial museum and the Great Mosque and muslim quarter tomorrow, then a Confucian Stele museum and a Daoist temple the next day.

In case it hasn’t been evidence, I’ve cut the Daoist mountain out of my intinerary. I hope to visit there someday, but I ended up in Xi’an a day later than I expected because of the availability of train tickets, and it turns out the mountain is really impossible to do properly without at least two days; to do it I’d have to blow off lots of stuff in Xi’an I want to see, so I’ll have to save it for next time.

MASS TRANSPORTATION STATS:
Planes taken: 1
Buses taken: 8
Trains taken: 1
Cabs taken: 14
Private vehicles taken: 2

Specifically, “train” and “terra-cotta warriors”.

I got up Sunday morning and made my way to the train station, which, like all Chinese train stations, seems to have been created as a demonstration of the Chinese expression 人山人海: literally, “people mountain people sea”, figuratively, people everywhere.

After three hours of waiting (I got there early) we finally got on the train and I got my stuff situated on the top bunk of the hard sleeper car. For some reason (I don’t buy my tickets early enough) I always end up on the top bunk, which requires the agility (and size) of a spider monkey to get to and cannot be slept in comfortably because it’s a bed on a Chinese train.

The trip was about 18 hours, but there wasn’t much to see out the windows. We left at 12:30 pm, so most of the trip was at night anyway. I did see a giant nuclear power plant, and lots of the Chinese countryside. Chinese countryside, by the way? So poor. It’s like driving through rural Maine, but the crappy houses are like twenty times worse, and the quaint townhouses owned by rich summer people don’t exist. I also saw many rivers of extremely questionable colors including (but not limited to) yellow and a deeply frigtening shade of light green.

There were two other foreigners on the train, but I didn’t meet them — then. (The plot will thicken). I did meet a guy from Sichuan, who apparently studies electrical something or other in Xi’an and was heading back to start the semester up again. I listened to about 6 hours of music on my iPod (that thing has the battery of a champion, not even half dead), and then went to “sleep”.　

We arrived in the Xi’an station at about 6am, which was somewhat problematic for me.Ｉ had already picked out a hostel but hadn’t actually booked it yet, so there was nowhere for me to go, and it was too early to do anything. I also couldn’t call the hostel (or anyone) because my phone bill had run over the night before and my phone was shut off (you can’t pay phone bills from the train). I was also pretty cold because I was dressed for Chengdu weather, but the temperature is around 0 Celcius here (i.e., 32 Fahrenheit).

Luckily when I walked out of the station I almost immediately saw someone carrying a sign for the hostel I picked (7 Sages) and looking for “Danielle”. I asked if I could tag along with them and book a room, and she said yes, possibly because I also offered to help hold her Danielle sign.

Eventually Danielle (Austrailian) and her mom showed up — they were the foreigners from the train — and we squeezed into a cab and headed to the hostel, which as it turns out was about two feet away. They checked into their rooms (oh yes, the old 6 am check in) and I booked and checked into mine, then met back up with them. I had agreed to help them buy train tickets and then tag along with them to the terra cotta warriors, which I was planning to visit today anyway.

After the ticket buying (fun!) and being yelled at by a billion people offering tours for exhorbitant prices (fun!) we found the public bus (fun!) that goes to the warriors by way of some other local sites and took it there.

The TCW site is organized into three pits and museum, plus a weird 360 degree cinema showing a strangely uninformative film about the first emperor that was entirely in English, and thus lost on 99% of the people there watching it. In accordance with Lonely Planet’s idea of going from lamest to coolest, we did the cinema and museum first. The museum was especially lame, although it did have a gigantic statue of a terracotta warrior holding hands with a girl-doll with gigantic, creepy eyes, thus reminding us all that, although ancient, the TCW are actually fucking terrifying and furthermore are friends with those creepy-eyed dolls your grandmother keeps as heirlooms.

Anyway, we went from there to Pit 2, which was gigantic but mostly empty or unexcavated. You could see some broken pieces, but there wasn’t much in the actual pit. Over on the side, though, they had several of the warriors encased in glass so that one could examine them up close, as well as some of the weapons and other stuff.

Giving up on the “saving the best for last” we went from there to Pit 1, which is the one you have seen pictures of. There are an estimated 6,000 warriors in Pit 1, although not all of them have been excavated, and calling it impressive would be an understatement. The pit itself is the width of a football field and the length of twoish, and there are tons of essentially untouched warriors standing there in formation with horses and weapons, etc., waiting for something. It’s a little creepy.

Ultimately, though, what’s impressive about the place is not so much the sight itself — which you could get from photos — as the realization that these things were made by people over two thousand years ago. Two thousand years ago, and they’re still here, although the color has faded. I can’t tell you how many classes I have studied them in, or how many classes I have studied the first emperor in, and to see them standing there and realize that he saw the same thing a few millenia ago was pretty crazy.

Pit 3 was much smaller because it was the officers pit, the part meant to command the rest of the army in Pits 1 and 2. I was amused that most of the officers were headless (the result of rebel attacks on the tomb following the first emperor’s death), given how often soldiers seem to joke about brainless commanders. I can’t help but think the guys in Pit 1 would appreciate it, if they could see it, had brains themselves, and generally were a lot less inanimate than they currently are.

Anyway, we took a different bus back. This bus took the “scenic” (poverty-stricken) route, and suffered delays because the bus matron (this seems as good as any other name I can think of) was conducting an experiment as to how many people she could fit into a minibus. (A lot, it turns out, although not comfortably).

We got back, walked back to the hostel, and I took a shower and attempted to plan my stay here a bit before heading out to see if I could walk to the south gate. Old Xi’an is still enclosed in city walls that date to the Ming Dynasty (there were city walls before then too that were actually much bigger), the perimeter is apparently 14km which makes everything inside it (a lot of the tourist sites) walkable from our hostel, situated near the north gate and train station.

On the walk to the south gate I also inadvertantly discovered a cool if touristy sidestreet, and I anticipate there’s much more to explore but it was getting late and I wanted to eat, so I headed back to a Sichuan restaurant near the hotel. As always, I was the only foreigner there, which attracted some attention, especially when I started eating (he can use chopsticks, gasp!) but the food was pretty good, and unlike the food I had the other day in Chengdu, it didn’t murder me with spices.

Tomorrow, the plan is to walk or bike along the city walls, and then do something else in the afternoon. I forget what, but I bet it will be interesting.

MASS TRANSPORTATION STATS:
Planes taken: 1
Buses taken: 6
Trains taken: 1
Cabs taken: 14
Private vehicles taken: 2

Fair warning: I’m writing this a little bit drunk. But it isn’t my fault! We’ll get to that.

Last night, after writing that post, I went out to dinner with a fellow traveler and a Chinese friend we’d met. I forget what the name of what we ate was, it was essentially lots of different things on sticks that were then dipped into a boiling pot of spicyness. After the stick-things are cooked, they bring the spice-pot to your table, you take the stick-things out and eat them.

It was pretty good. Among other things, I ate the heart of an animal. According to science, this means I now control its essence, therefore, in the future if you call me a pig I will take it as a compliment.

Then we went back to Chinese Girl’s apartment, which was on the 18th floor of her building and had a balcony with a cool view of the city. We drank some beers, etc., and listened to music, etc. Then they went to a club and I, not wanting to be a third wheel, went home and hung out in the bar talking to a Dutch guy for a while. I also bought one of the bar’s 15 RMB brownies; it was disappointing.

Today I woke up at the crack of noon and headed out without much of an agenda. It was a beautiful day and I had already done all the stuff I really wanted to in Chengdu so I decided to see if I could walk into the city center. As it turned out, I could, and after an hour or so I was watching syncronized fountains spray water into the air in front of the giant statue of Mao that dominates Tianfu Square.

Actually, before I got to the Square I did stop off for a minute to buy a large piece of pineapple on a stick, which cost me virtually nothing and was freakin’ delicious. Anyway, after that I went to the aforementioned Square/Mao statue, and I wandered around there for a while, then headed west a bit to People’s Park, which appeared to be having some kind of flower celebration.

All Chinese parks are always full of old people — it’s the law — but because it is Valentine’s Day today, the park was also full of lots of smiling couples incompetently paddling rowboats around the park’s manmade lake. Within the park grounds there was a small museum dedicated to the Sichuan Railway Protection Movement, a movement against foreign incursions and government corruption vis-a-vis railroads that had a significant impact on and speeded the coming of the Xinhai (or 1911) Revolution. It was all in Chinese, so it took me a while to read the exhibits and I didn’t read everything, but it was still pretty interesting.

I wandered around the park a while longer, watching the crowds watching people play mahjong and listening to the crappy piped-in music clashing with the equally crappy live music performances. It was pretty crowded, but I suspect it’s a fairly nice place when it’s not a holiday, or not beautiful weather.

After a while, I decided to head back, with the general idea that I would find somewhere to have dinner that provdided genuine Sichuan cuisine. Just when I was beginning to despair of this, I found a restaurant with “Sichuan Cuisine” in the name. There was no one in it, but this was at 4:30 or so and there weren’t many people in most restaurants, so I went in.

I ordered two things, Unidentified Pepper Thing and Kung Pao Chicken, which has always been one of my favorite foods but is nevertheless a Sichuan specialty. I also ordered a bottle of beer. Unidentified Pepper Thing came first, and it wasn’t very good. Cold, extremely spicy, and covered in a sauce that wasn’t excellent. The Kung Pao Chicken was better, but laced with a type of pepper that shows up in Sichuan food frequently, so potent that it’s reportedly used as an anaesthetic by some rural dentists’ offices.

Anyway, it takes like soap, but I can handle it. Somewhere about halfway through the meal, though, I took a bite of Unidentified Pepper Thing and my mouth exploded. I’m not sure what sort of pepper it was, but it caused a deep, burning pain in my tongue that lasted five minutes and could not be quenched with rice or beer. Over those five minutes, I drank almost all of the first beer and almost all of another one trying to put the fire out (Chinese beer bottles contain about 40 oz of beer I think, they’re significantly bigger than American beer bottles, even those big Budweiser ones). Anyway, the meal was expensive and somewhat disapointing even at the points when it wasn’t painful. Lesson learned: stick to the cheap hole-in-the-wall places, it’s cheaper and the food tastes better, too.

I eventually recovered from the spice and left, stopping off at a convenience store to buy food for the train tomorrow. The convenience store was not impressively stocked (although they do carry a good flavor of Gatorade, which shocked me since it’s impossible to find ANY flavor of Gatorade in Harbin), so it looks like I’ll either be eating in the train’s overpriced and crowded meal cars or subsisting on peanuts and snickers. Woohoo!

Generally speaking, Chengdu seems like a cool city. There’s lots of history, and a pretty active nightlife as well, although I mostly ignored that in the interest of saving money. The traffic here is remarkably civilized (well, compared to Harbin), and today I found myself crossing a road with the “walk” sign still red while all the Chinese people waited patiently at the crosswalk for the light to change. In that way, it almost doesn’t seem like China.

There are tons of people though; I deeply fear the train station tomorrow as I have seen the masses that gather there. Inexplicably, almost anywhere you go there are people dragging luggage on the streets as though they had just gotten out of the airport baggage claim, even when you aren’t near a major bus or train station. Lots of them ride bikes, too, way more than in Harbin. It’s probably because the weather is warm enough that you could feasibly do that almost year-round here.

The downside of Chengdu is that it’s very damp. When the sun comes out, it helps a little, but generally the city is shrouded in a damp fog that’s probably also at least in part horrific pollution. I’m not sure I’d ever want to live here long-term because that dampness would get really old really fast, but otherwise it’s a fun city. Still, I’m ready for tomorrow’s train and already preparing for Xi’an.

MASS TRANSPORTATION STATS:
Planes taken: 1
Buses taken: 4
Trains taken: 0
Cabs taken: 13
Private vehicles taken: 2

Seriously, pandas everywhere.

After another evening in at the hostel last night (seriously, having a bar/net cafe/restaurant with reasonable prices on the premises makes leaving less appealing than it might otherwise be), I got up early this morning to head to the Chengdu Giant Panda Breeding and Research Base. It was full of pandas.

We saw some red pandas first. They’re the small red ones that look like overgrown racoon-squirrels. Pretty cute, but they’re not really pandas. Then we moved on to an enclosure with 3 giant pandas, each two years old. They were still fairly small, but it was feeding time and the bamboo had been placed right near the side of the enclosure, so the entire time they were perhaps ten feet away from us. They really exude an air of relaxation, rolling around on their backs and leisurely chewing bamboo leaves like there was nothing else they ever needed to to (which there really isn’t).

We saw some more younger pandas, including some pretty young cubs, and got many cute photos and some pretty hilarious video footage. Pending its debut on this site in a few weeks, I’ll just say that it appears young pandas enjoy climbing but haven’t actually mastered it yet.

The base also has a decent museum and a video documenting the whole captive breeding process, which served to illuminate just how terrible parents giant pandas are. Seriously, they are cute, but they are very stupid. We saw a video of one giving birth and then immediately trying to kill its baby because the baby was screaming and the adult panda couldn’t figure out what it was. (Luckily the keepers saved it, a pretty risky move since adult pandas are quite large and apparently will bite people if aggrivated).

Anyway, it turns out pandas have been around for a long time, since the time of saber-toothed cats basically, but they used to be carniverous. They adapted to eat bamboo because it’s the only readily available, reliable food source in their shrinking territory (which, even 300 years ago, was significantly larger, probably 15 times its current size according to the museum). Unfortunately bamboo has virtually no nutrition in it, so they need to eat it pretty much constantly to survive. Pandas in captivity get special bamboo sprayed with nutriets as well as nutritional supplements, though.

After the panda thing, I hooked up with a fellow traveler for lunch and we found an extremely back-alley place nearby to have some spicy noodles and rice water. The weather was gorgeous today, sunny and warm, so we hung out there for a while and then strolled through a nearby street market before heading to the train station where I helped him buy a ticket to Kunming for tomorrow. Then we came back to the hostel and I hung out in its beautiful garden writing songs before wandering around the city a bit in the late afternoon.

Tomorrow is my last real day in Chengdu, but I’m not 100% sure what I’m going to do yet. The day after tomorrow, I get on the 18-hour Xi’an-bound sleeper train.

MASS TRANSPORTATION STATS:
Planes taken: 1
Buses taken: 4
Trains taken: 0
Cabs taken: 11
Private vehicles taken: 2

I left my apartment in Harbin around noon Tuesday and boarded a bus headed for the airport. Because I’m paranoid, I was at the airport super early — my flight didn’t leave until 4:30. After a stopover in Jinan, we landed in Chengdu, Sichuan just before 10 PM. Being lazy, I took a cab to the hostel I’d booked and crashed in my bed.

The next morning, I woke up at 7 AM in order to make a day trip to Leshan and see its giant Buddha, the largest Buddha statue in the world (thanks, Taliban!). I took a cab to the bus, a bus to Leshan, another bus to the park, and then spent the day wandering around the labyrinthine trails there. Aside from the Buddha itself and a temple there isn’t much there worth seeing so the part has made a number of its own statues, copies of famous ancient Buddhist statues and carvings from around Asia. Not old, but still cool.

Really, though, the only reason to go is the Giant Buddha, and he did not dissapoint. I emerged from a trail near his head and got some incredible views from there before descending a cliffside staircase to the bottom to take pictures from below the Buddha, who absolutely towers above you. Obviously I have pictures but you’ll have to wait till I get home to see them.

I left the park, took a cab to the bus station, a bus to Chengdu, a cab to the hostel, and then headed down to its restaurant/bar for a drink and some food. There, I met some British chaps, and we ended up headng out to a bar on the other side of Chengdu for a bit of evening entertainment.

This morning, I woke up later and went to Wenshu Monastery, one of the oldest and largest active Zen monasteries in China (note: it is not a Japanese monastery, I’m just using the term Zen because it’s the one most Americans are familiar with, but this monastery is a part of the Chinese tradition that predates and led to Japanese Zen). It’s a large place with temples, monks, pagodas, and a beautiful garden where I was able to sit and meditate for a bit before a middle-aged Chinese man sat down next to me and started talking to himself.

At one point, a beautiful black and blue bird was feeding on seeds along the railing near a pagoda there. I wanted to take a photo of it, but every time I lifted the camera it would fly away, then come back as soon as I put it down. This happened a few times before I gave up, reflecting that one of Buddhism’s essential teachings is detachment, the idea that “you can’t take it with you”. The bird, in a way, reminded me to enjoy the moment and its beauty for its own sake, because in reality although I can take photos I cannot capture the moment and take it home. Anyway, it seems quite fitting to me that I would be reminded of this by a bird, in a Buddhist temple.

After that and a quick stop off in a nearby nunnery, I grabbed lunch at a local hole-in-the-wall. So far, Sichuan has completely lived up to its reputation as the home of China’s most delicious food. I don’t know much about it, but I know enough to order Sichuan specialty dishes, and so far, they’ve been great even though I have been eating in very cheap places.

Then I cabbed to the Green Ram Temple, a Daoist temple that was cool, although not as large or impressive as the Wenshu Monastery. From there, I walked to Du Fu’s Thatched-roof Cottage.

Du Fu is one of China’s most famous poets, he and his contemporary Li Bai essentially define Tang dynasty poetry. Apparently, he had lived in Xi’an but came to Chengdu fleeing rebellion. His “cottage” is really a whole network of buildings and gardens, and it’s easy to see where he got the inspiration for the 200+ poems he wrote while living there. Although what exists today is reconstructed, they do have several archaeological pits for viewing as well as a ton of vases and vessels they have discovered on site and dated to the Tang dynasty.

This complex, too, was pretty large, and I’m not sure I saw all of it, but my legs and interest gave out on me, so I returned to the hostel to drink some Gatorade (!!!) and take a shower.

Tomorrow I hope to go see pandas, Saturday is still up in the air, and Sunday I’m out of here on a train bound for Xi’an.

MASS TRANSPORTATION STATS:
Planes taken: 1
Buses taken: 4
Trains taken: 0
Cabs taken: 9

…So I’ll be out of touch for more or less the next three weeks. You might see the occasional update but it’s possible I won’t post for three weeks. The general plan is this:

Tomorrow: Fly to Chengdu, Sichuan
Sunday the 15th: Train to Xi’an, Shaanxi
Saturday the 21st: Bus to Luoyang, Henan
Sunday March 1st: Fly from Zhengzhou, Henan

I’ll update with photos, video, etc. when I get back. If this blog isn’t updated within a couple days after I get back, somebody contact the embassy…