西安: Part 2

And the story of my trip to Xi'an finally continues!

7/15/11, Friday:
Around 7:30ish am we arrived in Xi'an. Although the train ride was fun, it was certainly a relief to finally get off. Once we got out of the train station, it was pretty amusing watching my American friends being approached by locals and asked in English about visiting the Terracotta Army. (Fortunately, being the smart students we are, we already had plans pretty well laid out.)

[signs of Westernization in Xi'an]

After taking a quick break at the hotel, around noon we explored the center of the city. It's definitely been Westernized, i.e. McDonald's, KFC, Pizza Hut, Dunkin Donuts, Baskin Robins. (There was also a Chinese McDonald's KFC hybrid which was also interesting.) For better or worse, the city center has definitely capitalized on Western tourists. Example number one: for lunch, we each ended up paying 17 kuai for five jiaozi at a restaurant. Example number two: later in the day, we found out that on the city wall, a bottle of water costs 15 kuai (at a supermarket you can usually buy a bottle for 1 or 2 kuai). Of course, these prices are reasonable for an American, but for your average Chinese citizen, it's just slightly ridiculous.

After lunch, we visited the Bell Tower (钟楼, Zhōnglóu; located in the center of the city) and the Drum Tower (鼓楼; Gǔlóu), which both gave nice views of the city. However, entering the Bell Tower, although both of the boys easily got through, both of us girls (both huayi) were requested to show our student ID's since we had student-discounted tickets. The guy at the door almost didn't let me in, saying that 1) my picture didn't look like me and 2) that the person in the picture looked like a guy. Luckily for him, I was slightly at a loss for (Chinese) words. Fortunately, the Bell Tower was also definitely worth the trip.

      
[top: the Bell Tower; bottom, left to right: 1) bell at the Bell Tower,
2) view from the Bell Tower, 3) drums at the Drum Tower]

Afterwards, we biked on the city wall (城墙), which was pretty awesome. Renting a bike was 20 kuai for 100 minutes, which was definitely worth it. The city wall is exactly as it sounds; it's essentially a wall that encloses the core of the city and since the city itself is pretty large, the wall makes for a pretty nice ride. As a personal aside, I did have the mishap of almost passing out on wall, due to a combination of that afternoon being particularly hot and myself being pretty dehydrated (this is also when we learned that tourists can be charged ridiculous amounts for water and popsicles). Fortunately, my friends were super awesome in helping me out and made sure that I didn't end up dying during my ride around the city wall.

[south entrance to the city wall]

That evening, we checked out the Muslim Quarter, which was definitely one of my favorite parts of the city (we ended up going a second time the next day). There were lots of souvenirs, lots of dried fruit, as well as a lot of delicious street food. In addition to eating some chuànr ( 串儿, kebabs which are pretty common to other parts of China), we also ate yángròu pào mó (羊肉泡馍, very small pieces of bread soaked in a bowl of lamb broth) and shìzi bǐng (柿子饼, deep fried persimmons stuffed with filling, typically black sesame seed paste), both of which are Xi'an specialties. While eating yángròu pào mó, a couple of locals sat down with us and discussed doing research during their recent trip to France (apparently they thought our two American male friends were French...). Although I'm unsure of whether they said they were professors or had some other academic profession, our conversation with them was definitely interesting (Andy Warhol was somehow included in the discussion). After dinner, we were also able to visit the Grand Mosque (清真寺; Qīngzhēnsì), the first mosque to be built in China.

[prayer at the Grand Mosque]

Despite being quite sleep deprived, Friday was a pretty good day; we were able to hit up a bunch of different places, and the shìzi bǐng were quite tasty.