Xian

Ni Hao!

At 4.20pm we headed to Beijing's West Railway Station. We managed to squeeze ourselves into the narrow cabin train with our backpacks and all. The sleepers' compartment was split into sections of 6 bunk beds each, 3 on either side. There were no doors nor divisions so the tiny compartments led to a narrow corridor whereby people could get through to the toilets and have a smoke! We chatted, drank and nibbled till about 10.30, all excited as it was a first for most of us. Then the lights went out and we huddled onto our hard bunk beds in our clothes and tucked into the duvets provided. It wasn't an easy sleep (no wonder they're called hard-sleepers!!), obviously with the train stopping at various stations on the way too. But it was ok better than I might have ever expected. We also learnt to master pee- squatting on a moving train !! :)

We stumbled off our train at about 7.30am in Xian which is in the Shaanxi Province. Xian, is a modern city's and apart from the big shopping malls and Starbucks etc ...(!!) it has lots of historic attractions the main one however, being the Terracotta Warriors. We dropped our stuff at our nice hotel and after a quick tour and a dumplings breakfast in a tiny outlet in the backstreets of the city, we were picked up for our visit to the Terracotta Warriors. We good not stop feasting our eyes at the army that spread across 3 huge warhouses. Each of them are said to have a different faces and carry the name of the person who sculptured them. It truly is a marvel and a nation's historic gem. I couldn't believe I was standing infront of the very thing! That evening we had a chinese banquet dinner and also got to taste (well, I did, some others oozed it down!) of bo cha - an strong alcoholic drink which is drank like a tea ie warm, yuck!!! Anyways, after that and on our way to a 'pussy cat dolls' bar, we came across an open parade. People were dancing to the beat of huge drums waving multi-coloured umbrellas and fans. Our leader challenged us we'd join in...and off we went. A man handed me over his glittery umbrella and I kind of became a leader of the a trail of dancers. Oh well, not knowing what else to do I tried to follow others. Gosh we laughed so much. At first we got the nasty looks from the locals who glared at our intrusion and moreover lack of the dance knowledge and style. But then ended up joyfully prancing about with us and even taking photos of us :)

Next morning....
If it weren't for our hotel room's phone ringing at 7.30am I would have overslept. It was Gemma asking whether we would be interested in joining her and Kris to go to the South Gate park to watch people doing Tai Chi. Of course, I wanted to so I joined them within the next 10 mins. The city was misty from the morning fog or rather smog. The minute we got to the park, there was a group of elderly people dancing and beating on their little drums tied to their sides. As we strolled through the massive park we met loads of others here and there, most of them practicing Tai Chi; some individually others with their instructors. The latter demonstrated high skill especially with the swords. Of course, I was in awe. Their simple graceful gestures seemed to be so easy to follow....mmm after a few years of training, at least! At one point we came across an elderly man proudly playing his Chinese violin, which is made of two stings and played vertically instead of horizontally and called an erhu.



Further on we came across 3 pairs of badminton players and they asked us to play in turns with them, which was great. A woman and a few others were balancing a what looked like a big yo-yo. Taking note of my curious face she offered me to try it. I managed to balance it only once out of many but it was a good laugh for my spectators, who became quite a crowd by the end of my performance!!! I also got to do some leg stretching with some others too :) I must say they are very friendly people and even though we couldn't speak a common language we still enjoyed our walk in the park. Last but not least, another elderly man (well, at that hour you'd expect the younger generation to be at school or at work anyway!) was practising some Chinese calligraphy on the floor using which looked like a huge colour paintbrush the size of a broom. Pretty impressive.

Out of the park, our stomachs grumbled so we hunted for some breakfast and feasted on some kind of huge Chinese cookies; round filo pastries filled with dates and walnuts, mmm ...quite nice ;)

I then spent the next hours going through the open market in the Muslim area, which is situated towards the north of the beautiful drum tower. Having bought some souvenirs I went to the post office and posted the lot home, cross fingers the pack gets to Malta or UK!! Having picked my fresh laundry I decided to visit the mosque. Having gone through yet another narrow street market (which reminded me of Turkey) I finally found the way to the mosque, well, not quite it was a Chinese pagoda style building where muslims practice their religion apart from opening it up as a showcase for tourists, of course. Right I was ready for a foot massage at the blind's parlour. Not before bumping into Jory & Erin who were in the never-ending queue for permusan cakes. Apparently, this is a delicacy in this area so greedy and curious as we were we queued for an hour or so. The red coloured 'cakes' (made out of a certain type of tomatoe) with an very sweet filling of walnut and figs was well, nice but not to die for. I just nicknamed them Chinese doughnuts, cause so they were similarly made and fried. My foot massage was something I've had never done; one whole hour of massage both feet ....aaaaahhhhss and uuuuuhhhhhsss!!!!! but was so relaxing that I just flew back to the hotel to prepare for the next sleeper train journey.

There is no such thing as day of the week or dates when you're travelling, there's only the day that lies ahead of you; the objective or scope of that day which takes you to another step within the journey :)

ta for now, look out for more..... Nicky X X X X