Xi’an – The Oldest Chinese City

We left Beijing the following morning after visiting the Great Wall to head to
Xi’an, the oldest Chinese city. It would be a 13 hour train ride, this much we knew. What we didn’t know though was the difference between a ‘hard seat’ ticket vs. a ‘hard sleeper’ ticket. Basically there a three classes of train travel in China. A soft sleeper is a four birth cabin with a door, a hard sleeper has about 50 beds in a train car all open to each and a hard seat is just that, open bench seating throughout the train car.
For some reason, we thought it would be a good idea to go for the hard
seat. Maybe we were thinking we’d just save some money or maybe we thought
it wouldn’t be that bad and we’d be able to sleep alright. Well, no
matter what we paid, I’d have paid double the price for the hard
sleeper looking back on it now…

The wall that surrounds the center city of Xi’an. You can actually rent bikes and ride on top of the wall…

We arrived at the station with a bit of time to spare but apparently
the way things operate in the station in Beijing is to have you line up
to go through a gate before you can get to your platform so we ended
up standing around for twenty minutes and then of course there was a
huge rush to the train once they opened the gate. At first we couldn’t
understand why the rush but then we finally got into the train car, we
realized the reason as there was not enough room for everyone’s
luggage. There weren’t enough seats either!

One of the nicest hostels I’d stayed in so far in my travels…

People were already sitting throughout the cabin while others were standing up trying to figure out where to put their luggage just the same as we were. When we reached our seats, we had to kick out the people already occupying them and then we had no choice but to put our luggage in front of us and try to figure
out where to put our legs between us and the seats facing in front of
us. Once the train took off it seemed to get even worse as there were
people running everywhere up and down the isles along with people
trying to both sit and stand in the isle as they had no seat. On top of this, the food cart was also being continually pushed up and down the isle, pushing and shoving people into the seating areas. It was awesome. As there wasn’t anything more to add to the chaos, people are allowed to freely smoke so the entire cabin was filled with smoke for much of the ride. And then, at around 11pm, the fun started…

The night I discover variations with the classic game of 8 ball. Back home, its always been that you play ‘solids and stripes’. But when you play with the English, the Australians, South Africans and the Swedish, all of a sudden you have bigs and littles, highs and lows, solids and spots, and halves and wholes. Wait, what are we again?

There were some guys across from me that were trying to tell me to
move to another seat so they could play cards. I acted like I didn’t
speak Mandarin (or understand simple hand gestures) but that only
lasted about ten minutes.

Keepin it classy…

Soon they just decided to grab some portable chairs and play anyway on the small table that sat in front of me. For the next four and a half hours I had two Chinese men standing behind my seat, leaning over me, two sitting across from me, one standing
over me continually spilling his noodle juice and drink onto my leg and another sitting on a portable seat to my right that kept wanting to use my leg as a crutch for his elbow as he leaned all over me to play cards. He smelled fantastic too.

How comfortable do we look right now? Almost six hours straight of this. And I never left my seat for the entire thirteen hour train ride.

If I told you what we saved on these tickets, you’d think we were crazy for booking these tickets. I didn’t actually get to doze off until the game ended which was just after 3:30 in the morning and our train got in around 6am so you can
imagine I was in great spirits. And getting off the train was no
picnic either. We had to grab all our bags and somehow step over,
through (and sometimes on) at least fifty people before getting
through the train door exit. And the only way to get through with all your bags
was for the people behind you to push you while the people in
front would pull you, either by your bag or your jacket. By the end of
it all, train carriage #7 had given birth to 3 backpackers!!!

After getting off the train, we decided to just walk to the hostel we
booked since we had been sitting cramped for so long. It was only about a thirty minute walk which wasn’t bad and it’s fairly easy to orient yourself in Xi’an too as there is a wall that surrounds the entire center city. You can actually walk on top of the wall around the entire center of the city and even rent bikes if you want but while we were here it was either raining or cloudy the entire time so we knew there wouldn’t be much of a view.

Xi’an is an interesting city to visit. It has a population of over 8 million and is one of China’s oldest cities dating back over 3,100 years. It does have a good bit of history and sightseeing to do while here but I think the main reason people travel here is the proximity to the Army of the Terracotta Warriors which we were planning to visit later in the week. Most of the rest of the time we spent in Xi’an
was just walking around the city, experiencing the life of the locals
and trying as many local restaurants as possible. If you picked them
right, you could eat for as little as 9 or 10 Yuan which is the
equivalent of about $1.50 USD. And if you were able to pick the right
food on the menu, you could luck out with something really good. Most
of the places we went had only a menu in Chinese characters and that
was it. No pictures, no english translations and almost always no one
in the restaurant that could speak any english. And because they often
don’t do well with charades (its hard to act out “I want noodles”)
your best bet is to find a place that already has some people eating
in the restaurant, walk by each table and find someone that might have
something you want, point to it and tell them that’s what you want.
But even this doesn’t work all the time.

Can you spot the fake? My friend had gotten ‘the switch’ pulled on her in a cab. She’d given the 100 to the cabbie up front. He fumbled with it for a bit out of view then handed her back a 100 saying it was ‘fake’. That part was true, she did now have a fake since he kept the real 100 for himself which she later found out.

Sometimes you just have to pick something on the menu and hope for the best.
For some good examples, a few of us walked into a tiny 4 table restaurant, tried to order what we thought were noodles with a bottle of water and ended up with a Chinese hamburger pancake and two bowls of hot dirty water. On another occasion, we found a restaurant where they actually had pictures on the menu (yes!) so we all ordered things that we thought we recognized. Well, there was this one dish I had my eye on. It looked just like Szechuan beef with vegetables. When it arrived I started eating it and the sauce itself was clearly not Szechuan but it was still pretty good.

The meat however was far from beef. I really had no idea exactly what it was and I made just about everyone at the table try it. It just didn’t ‘look’ right if you know what I mean. It had a bit of a weird shape to it…and an odd consistency. Well, I took a picture of the Chinese characters that described the dish, brought it back to my hostel and asked the Chinese girls working the counter what
it was I just ate. After they were done laughing they told me it was pig intestine. Yum. I guess it could have been something worse like cold fish head but at least maybe then I’d have known what it was I was eating. Sometimes its better not to know I guess. I ate half the plate. I’m still here. I guess it didn’t kill me. Knowing what I know about some of the other foods in China though, I think it could have been a lot worse…

Umm… Lets see…How can I explain this photo? Well, we stopped into a small 4 table restaurant, sat down and tried to order three bowls of noodles. We ended up with two bowls of hot dirty water and that Chinese pancake looking thing you can see in the background…. It was the two bowls of hot water that were most confusing. Can you spot the steam rising off them?

Although there were many restaurants we tried out, I was amazed at the
amount of KFC’s there were in the city. This was the same as in Beijing. For some reason, the KFC’s in China seemed to outnumber the McDonald’s. There was even an Obama Fried Chicken that was opened for about two weeks but was shut down by the government about two week  before we arrived. And KFC’s main competition here is a Chinese fast food chain called Dico’s.

PBR… yes they have it here….

I’ve eaten there a few times, mainly because
they’re everywhere and you can get a lot of food for cheap that includes some vegetables. But if you do ever travel to Xi’an, one of the best places to visit,  especially for food, is the Muslim quarter. We rather stumbled upon it one day while we were walking the city but when you get there, you realize just how
different it is from the rest of Xi’an.

Entering the Muslim Quarter

There were hundreds of these street vendors throughout the Muslim Quarter

It is not only a great place to buy souvenirs but also to try many different types of foods. The streets in that area are lined with hundreds of street vendors selling
everything from fried dumplings and grilled vegetables to meat on a
stick and crates of yak kidneys. And to add to the craziness of these
streets were the motor bikes and three wheeled taxis running up and
down blaring their horns.