Xian was the capital of China for a couple thousand years, back in the day. It's the location of many historical sites, including the famous army of terra-cotta warriors, a life-sized army of statues buried to protect a former powerful emporer after his death. The nearby mausoleum is buried under a huge hill (the project took some 700,000 workers) and is trapped well enough that it is still sealed as archeologists figure out a way in that won't destroy everything.
While I saw a few other foreigners near where I was staying, this city was basically all Chinese people all the time. Some people would talk about you right in front of your face (you get used to hearing the word "laowai", meaning foreigner, pretty quickly), some will just stare, or others will yell a friendly or a solicitous "hello!" which I had to learn quickly to ignore if I wanted to walk anywhere.
The historical aspects of the city and its environs were pretty interesting, and I'm glad I made this detour. I wouldn't make it a first or absolutely necessary stop if you are going to be in China for a short time (definitely see Beijing, I would say), but if you are going to see a few places this is probably a good one to include.
If you want to see what there is to see, be a bit careful; the local tour guides know the public bus that is supposed to go out of town, and use this buses number on their own private bus. I ended up on such a bus via my hotel (a decision I made a little early in the morning after a long night train). We waited around for over an hour for more people to join the tour, but all that happened was the police came by and seized what was apparently the illegal sign they were using to advertise their tour in front of the bus. I was finally ready to just walk away, and started demanding my money back through my interpreter (one of the drivers who spoke a little bit of English). A small crowd gathered with my continued repeating of "buyao" ("don't want"), but they finally convinced me to get on the bus.
We left right away, and I then discovered that all the people on the bus were just getting a ride across town except for myself and one Chinese lady from Hangzhou. So they put us in a taxi and we got a private car for our adventure. We got along very well - especially considering her English was as good as my Chinese - and with only the two of us we didn't spend much time in the requisite shopping stops.
As a final note, the hotel I stayed in was decent for the money, though it was in the seedy train station area and came complete with a 1am call (Lonely Planet even mentions these) from a local working girl offering services. I missed the call because I thought it was my alarm and was trying to shut it off, but I did hear the ringing in the next room, then the next, and so on down the hall.
Posted by warcode at March 12, 2004 01:12 AM