12/19/2001
Old Drum Tower
We departed Beijing after class on Wednesday. The flight to Xian is about 2 hours, and so we arrived there around 8pm. We stayed at the Hyatt. Inside, it looks just like any other Hyatt I have ever been in, with all of the rooms arranged around a 15-story atrium with a garden bar/café below. We could have been in Cambridge.
We spent our first full day exploring the city. After sleeping in a bit and missing our complementary breakfast, we wandered down the street in search of food. Xian is a big city, but is less “western” than Beijing – more like what you might expect (fear?) China to be like. It is fairly modern, but there are no Starbucks there yet. The city suffers from fairly severe air pollution, especially in the winter. Sometimes we couldn’t see more than a few blocks because of all the coal dust in the air.
In the vicinity of the Hyatt, there are a surprising number of slightly strange looking coffee shops of one sort or another (and also, for that matter, many internet cafes). We chose one called “Stake and Caffee”. Turned out to be a weird coffee shop/bar/restaurant combination. While they had several choices for dinner (including “stake”), they didn’t have much at all for breakfast. We achieved our caffeine fix but were still hungry. Luckily, outside on the street were several vendors selling various small eats, mostly variations of “baozi” (thick, bready buns with various fillings). This hit the spot.
After filling up on baozi, it was off on our walking tour of Xian. First stop was the old Clock Tower. Originally built in the 14th century, rebuilt in the 18th, it is now now marooned in the middle of a huge traffic circle and surrounded by fairly ugly modern buildings, including one with a huge times-square style display board showing Jennifer Lopez videos. We payed a dollar to ring the bell 3 times, which was advertised as guaranteeing us luck, happiness, and such.
Next stop was the Muslim quarter. In part because of its proximity to central Asia, Xian has a fairly large Muslim population. There is one of the largest Mosques in China, surrounded by a series of narrow streets lined with vendors selling various knick-knacks and, more interestingly, local snacks. We wandered around a bit, and wound up at the Mosque. It is a collection of courtyards and small buildings which provide a peaceful refuge from modern Xian. The buildings and monuments within are covered with an interesting mix of Chinese and Arabic characters. There were only a few other tourists there, but several dozen locals – mostly older men wearing the traditional white cap – hanging around waiting for prayer to start. There was an Arabic sounding announcement over the PA system and they all meandered down to the main mosque building at one end of the complex. Leaving their shoes outside, they all filed into a large dimly lit room and took their places on the prayer rugs arranged in rows on the floor. We were left outside.
After the mosque, we wandered out of the Muslim quarter and down to the south gate. Along the way, we passed another street that seem to have nothing but more strange coffee shops. We also grabbed lunch at a little jiaozi (steamed dumpling) place. Then, we hopped in a cab and headed off to the Shaanxi Provincial History Museum, which is outside in the city wall in the southern part of the city.
The Shaanxi History Museum was great. It covers a lot of ground – from more-or-less stone-age times up through the Qing Dynasty (~1900) – and is chock full of various artifacts from each time period. You can’t help but be impressed with how long and rich China’s history is. We just made it through the last exhibit as the museum was closing, and as we came out the sun was just going down. So we hurried to cram in one more stop – the old city wall.
In ancient times, many Chinese cities were surrounded by huge walls. However, in the rush to modernize, many cities have torn these down. In Beijing, all that remains of the city wall is one or two of the gatehouse buildings. The rest was cleared to make room for a small expressway (the second ring road). However, through a combination of preservation and restoration, Xian still has almost all of its city wall. It forms a square enclosing the central city, each side of which is about 2-3 miles long. The wall itself is a massive structure, about 40 feet high, and 40 feet wide. There is also a moat that runs along the outside edge. Every half mile or so, there is a large gate building built into the wall with an opening big enough to allow a major avenue to pass underneath.
We bought tickets at the South Gate and climbed up the stairs onto the wall. Atop the wall, we found not only a bike rental place but also a few people operating a shuttle bus service using what look like over-sized golf-carts. Not sure how they got them up there, but there certainly is plenty of room on top of the wall for them to drive around. It was only about a mile to the gatehouse that was nearest our hotel, so we decided to walk home on the wall. It was getting dark, and there was pretty much no one else up there besides us except the occasional shuttle bus and a few people who operated a tourist information booth and one or two shops in some of the gate buildings. Along the way, we could look down on some of the old hutongs (alleys) that ran in between a mix of old, tile-roofed buildings and more modern, ugly structures. Among other things, we saw a small courtyard workshop where a few guys were operating some sort of strange machine. After a few minutes we figured out that they were forming coal into the bricks that so many people in Xian (and Beijing) use for cooking and heating.
When we got back to the hotel, we took up the task of planning our the rest of our trip. There was at least one tour company which offered a few full-day bus excursions to various sites outside of Xian, in either Chinese or English. Interestingly, the English ones were a lot more expensive ($25/person v. $6/person), but that is partly because they included your admission tickets to the various sites. We were not too high on the packaged tour concept, however, because we wanted to be able to decide how long to spend where. And we feared that the package tours would drag us off to some places that we didn’t really want to see – like state-run gift shops and the like. There was also the option of just hiring a car and driver. Many taxi drivers had already offered their services at around $15-$30 per day. Then, of course, the Hyatt offered the same service for about $60.
In the end, we decided that we wanted to try a different option – renting a car (without driver). In the US, renting a car is no big deal. However, in China, car rental is a fairly new thing. They just started permitting it a few years ago, and it is still only available in a few of the major cities. Not too long ago, there weren’t that many cars in China, and not many people had driver’s licenses. Transportation was mostly public bus or your bicycle. For most people, this is still the case. But more people own cars and even more hope to, so having a drivers license is becoming more common. (In fact, one of the most commonly mentioned benefits to the Chinese people of China joining the WTO is the increased availability of affordable cars. As a requirement for joining WTO, China will lower their tariff on imported cars, which is right now about 100%, to something like 25% over the next 5 years. I recently read that enrollment at Beijing’s Drivers Ed schools has doubled this year.)
The friendly people at the Hyatt’s desk helped us find a car rental company and made the initial call to set it up. However, they reported back that the company was a bit worried and they didn’t know what to do with us, since they had never rented to foreigners before. When we finally showed them that we actually had Chinese drivers licenses, they were a bit surprised but very relieved, and everything went smoothly from there on.
We had had a full day, but there was one more thing that we wanted to do. Since it was Thanksgiving, we were determined to find some form of turkey for dinner. It turned out that, for those who asked, the Hyatt was supplementing their standard dinner buffet with a plate of turkey, including stuffing and cranberry sauce. They also had pumpkin, apple, and pecan pie.
Click to enlarge
Caffee & Stake
Buying breakfast
Eating breakfast
Clock Tower Bell
Ringing the bell
View from the clock tower
Traffic
Cars and bikes
Snacks in the Muslim quarter
Muslim quarter
Mosque
Mosque
Mosque
Shoes
Strange Hotel
Jiaozi for lunch
Random door
On the city wall