Back in Beijing

So, we are now back in Beijing. As I had no computer or e-mail access during that period, I am behind in my journal writing. I'll try to catch up a bit. I haven't yet read mike's updates on this part of the trip, so i expect there to be some overlap.
The flight to Xi'an was only around an hour and a half; I was exhausted and slept pretty much all of it.
Xi'an's population is around 7-8 million, so it is a lot smaller than Beijing, and also has a more distinctly Chinese feel; it's a lot less metropolitan. It was a very old capital city, and as such has a lot of history.

The highlight of the trip, however, was a bit less history related. The first afternoon we were there we went to the city wall. Old chinese cities had walls around them, much like old European cities, but also like Europe most of these walls are now gone. Xi'an is rare in that its wall is still completely intact. The city has put considerable work in keeping it in good condition, probably largely due to the commercial interests involved in keeping the city as historical as possible.

Anyway, you could rent bikes and ride them around the wall, so mike and I rented a two person bicycle and set out. Mike sat in front and steered while I sat in the back and shouted things and sometimes took videos with mike's phone.
It was a lot of fun. The bike was a bit unwieldy, you don't so much as turn as you do drift to one side. The terrain was a bit rough at points, but the terrain combined with the clumsiness of the bike actually made it a lot of fun. Mike got pretty good at dodging the bigger pot holes.

We got some good videos, after Mike became more adept at steering and I got used to shooting from the back of a bicycle. At one point we caught up with some Japanese girls biking on two solo bikes, and when one of them looked over at us and saw us she started booking it away. It makes for a good video.

The rest of the trip was pretty fun, but unfortunately we had a rude awakening in that this was the first portion of our trip with a government hired tour guide. I found i really hate tour guides. This tour guide, Tony, was kind of annoying in general, but just having to sit through some tour guide go on and on about information we already know or sometimes just say things that are blatantly incorrect was pretty painful.

Though, worse were the places they took us to eat. We were taken to terrible hotel restaurants or tourist traps. The food was either mediocre or plain bad, which was painful considering how cheap and easy it is to find really good food in China. I assume that this is what people were talking about when they warned me about losing weight on China due to not finding food you like. Well, I'll tell you the truth: There is lots of amazing food in China, but you won't find it in the dumps where they take tourists. If you want my suggestion, DO NOT see China (or anyplace really) by way of a guided tour. This is not the way to see a country.

But I don't mean to complain too much. I did enjoy Xi'an. It was nice to go around and see a city farther from exposure to the rest of the world. Some of the museums and such we saw are fun; the terra cota soldiers were pretty cool. They were built by the Emporer Qin Shi Huangdi, who unified china around 220 BC. They were buried in his massive tomb complex, to guard him during the next life. They didn't work so well, as less than a decade after his death the part of the tomb that housed them was looted by a peasant-turned-rebel leader in order to steal their weapons (they had been buried with new weapons). The rebel leader then used these weapons to turn the tide of his campaign and ended up toppling the former Emperor's dynasty and setting up his own.

We also went to a museum-excavation site of a 'ancient matriarchal village', which had several stone age artifacts, and that was fun. It was interesting to see the excavation itself; I could recognize some of the archeological features (mostly post-holes and such), but many of the other 'features' they had displayed seemed very arbitrary to all but i assume a well-trained eye. It kind of made me remember why I decided not to go into archeology: most tedious job ever.
We didn't see any evidence of a matriarchal society, with the exception of some fake huts made of plaster that had depictions on their roof of large-breasted and naked women having sex with various animals. This had nothing to do with the actual excavation site.

The last night in Xi'an, I went to dinner with a bunch of the other kids to a really really really good restaurant. The food was amazing, which really saved my dining experiences on the trip.
Things were fun.

I'll start a new post for the Shanghai stuff.

-Tom