Beijing: Day two

Went to the Lama Temple, where there were many people praying among clouds of incense. Was strangely underwhelmed until I wandered into an exhibit of sculptures of strange, Indian-looking gods.

It was raining a little. I walked around nearby hutongs for a bit, then down an important street past a Ming-era center of Confucian learning. I feasted at a somewhat pricey vegetarian buffet on the same street; though it was obviously geared toward tourists, I took comfort from the fact that most of the tourists were Chinese.

It had occurred to me while I was at the Lama Temple that I wasn't really in the traveling mindset yet. And why not? Maybe because I hadn't seen anything really surprising yet, with the possible exception of Beijing's sparkling subway system. I needed to find something weird. After lunch I set out to buy a ticket for a kung fu show, another wild goose chase I won't go into other than that I finally did find the Chaoyang Culture Center, it apparently no longer hosts kung fu shows. Clearly the Beijing described in my Lonely Planet--published in spring 2007--was not the Beijing of October 2008.

I caught a taxi to the Pearl Market next and tried out my haggling skills on a windbreaker. The experience taught me that my haggling skills needed work. I didn't stay at the Pearl Market for long--not weird enough, and it seemed sensible to leave the shopping to the end of my trip. So I crossed the pedestrian bridge and entered the park surrounding the Temple of Heavenly Peace.

There for the first time, I felt myself really getting in to the traveling groove. People were singing in a huge group; others were playing a game with ping pong paddles but no table; down a little further people were playing instruments; further still, there were women with red spangled scarves around their waists dancing to recorded music. In more secluded spots among the trees people stretched and practiced tai chi. It was lovely and strange.

I wandered the park until dark. A sign claimed that some of the cypresses in the park (the park where the emperors used to come to pray for big harvests) were 800 years old. Here's a country Americans tend to think of as recklessly destroying its environment, yet in the heart of Beijing it's harbored trees through several dynasties and foreign invasions, a civil war, Communism, the Cultural Revolution, capitalism, and the city's famously polluted air.

At dark I headed to the famous snack street, but skipped the fried bugs on sticks--the weirdest thing I ate was fried ice cream on toast. The area the snack market is in seems like Beijing's answer to Times Square. In fact many parts of Beijing--those that I saw, anyway--were bigger, newer, and cleaner than the nicest parts of American cities. After snack street I turned in early once again, but this time with good reason: My bus to the Great Wall was to leave at 6:30 am the next day.

The wall

On October 6 I went to the Jinshanling section of the Great Wall with a bus bull of backpackers who'd booked the trip through our various hostels. It was a 3-hour drive each way to this less-trafficked section of the wall. We walked from there to the Simatai site, 10 km away. It was great to breathe fresh air again and see the wall, and it was a perfect sunny day. But it was another essentially unsurprising activity.

Back in Beijing I collected my backpack from the hostel and headed to the train station. I'd booked a ticket through my hostel, and only "hard seat" class spots were still available--the hostel worker explained that this was because people were returning home after the October 1 holiday week. When I'd read about hard seat in books about China I'd pictured a bench, but these were actually lightly-padded seats with non-reclining backs. I fell asleep almost immediately, and slept for much of the 12-hour trip, but woke up with quite a sore neck.

Terra cotta warriors

It was foggy and rainy in Shaanxi province. I'd made a reservation for once, and got a shuttle from the station to the hostel. Feeling like a new woman after a shower and breakfast, I set out to buy my next train ticket and see the terra cotta warriors. I managed to use my Chinese to buy a "hard sleeper" ticket for the next day, and left the train station feeling quite proud of myself, even though I was to leave at 13:20 instead of in the evening, as I would have preferred.

I walked in front of the train station looking for the shuttle bus to the warriors museum. There were huge puddles everywhere and I accidentally stepped in a few, wetting my feet through my sturdy hiking shoes. But I didn't wander long before a bus conductor saw me and pointed out the bus to me. I'd ridden a taxi to the train station and bough a ticket in Chinese, then found the correct bus, all in 20 minutes or so--my confidence in my travel skills was beginning to return.

I'd seen the warriors museum on the Travel Channel just a few months before, so it seemed an unlikely candidate for a site that would surprise me. But I found the warriors' expressive faces and broken, jumbled bodies (in the partly-excavated sections) strangely moving, as if they were real people who'd been interred here alive. In fact they do represent the exquisite life's work of countless nameless artisans, buried pointlessly for milennia thanks to an emperor's delusion of immortality.

After a few hours with the warriors I took the bus back to the city. It was about 6:00 when I arrived, and cold. I was very hungry. I walked down a major street for awhile without seeing anything remotely appealing, then spotted a restaurant on a side street. It didn't look like the kind of place that got many waiguoren, but I went in anyway.

One of the waitresses opened the door for me and asked how many people I was. This seems to be a mandatory question at restaurants in China, even when, as then, there's no one else around. I don't know whether it's an immutable rule that it must be asked, or if people are simply incredulous that anyone would go to a restaurant alone.

My apprehensions were confirmed when I got the menu: It had no English, no pinyin, and no pictures. The waitress patiently awaited my order as I whipped out my tiny dictionary, but clearly nether it nor I were up to the task of decoding that enormous menu. I decided to throw myself on the mercy of the waitress, even though she hadn't understood me the first time I asked for tea.

In Chinese, I explained that I don't eat meat, that I like vegetables and tofu and mushrooms. She aksed whether I liked spicy food, and I said no. There were other questions that I tried to guess at and muddle through. I said yes to rice.

And voila! A dish of tofu, mushrooms, onions, and peppers appeared a few minutes later, sans meat, with rice. I was incredibly awkward in Chinese, but maybe I could get by after all, I thought.

I turned in early again. This time my excuse was that I'd been on a train the night before. Besides, if I was to leave at midday, I wanted to get an early start.

Xi'an

I got a reasonably early start on the 8th, though I was slowed by some difficulty finding breakfast. I was determined not to eat in my hostel, on the grounds that it was overpriced, smokey, and too backpacker-y. But the coffee shop I found wasn't open yet, and street food just wasn't as ubiquitous as I'd expected. So... I settled for toast and scrambled eggs in the hostel next door, which turned out to be much prettier than mine. At least my quest led me through a strip of park that runs along the outside of the city wall, where early risers were socializing and exercising.

After breakfast I ascended the city wall at the South Gate and rented a rickety bike, then jounced in a rectangle around the central part of town. It's an impressive wall in terms of size, condition, and pretty sentry buildings and watch towers, but once you've seen one strip of it, you've seen it all. It was interesting to get a look at the slums, since I'd only seen the nicer parts of Xi'an to that point.

I used all 100 minutes of my bike rental to get all the way around (it was a long wall, and a rickety bike), then got a taxi to the town's big, ancient mosque. It was a very Chinese-looking mosque complex, and though it looked to be in good condition it had a dusty patina, which I liked. I was disappointed that only worshipers were allowed in the prayer hall, though I understood it.

Short on time, I stopped at several tiny shops in the Muslim quarter for provisions: several pieces of bread, some unidentified fruit, a preserved egg, pastries. I got a taxi back to the hostel, collected my backpack, and took a taxi to the train station.

Yes, I took a lot of taxis in China. It's lazy, but it's hard to justify trying to brave the bus system when someone will drive me where I want to go for a little over a dollar. I am on vacation. But taxis don't solve every problem: The drivers don't speak English, have never heard of my hostel, and didn't understand it I try to tell them the address. A Lonely Planet map (with street names in pinyin and characters) means nothing to them. So I coped by telling them a landmark near where I want to go, then walking. Eventually I started painstakingly copying addresses from Lonely Planet onto a small piece of paper, which they seemed to understand better than my spoken Chinese.

The 16-hour train ride was uneventful and fairly comfortable, with one scenic mountainous stretch before it got dark. I think there was meat in one of the pastries I'd bought, but the others were good. The dried fruit turned out to be crabapples, I thought--I couldn't remember ever having eaten a crabapple, so I couldn't be sure. The preserved egg tasted ok, but looked black and gelatinous and had a chemical smell. When I got to the yolk it was slimy, and I actually gagged. I threw the rest away.

I woke up sometime after 4:00 am and found the other three passengers from my compartment gone. I worried that I'd missed Chengdu, and stayed awake to make sure I wouldn't, if I hadn't already. In fact the conductor would have woken me up; she'd collected my ticket earlier, carefully folded it three ways, and pu7t it in a pocket in a book, handing me a plastic rectangle with my car and compartment numbers. This ritual was repeated in reverse shortly before arrival.