I avoided updating my blog in Kunming because there really wasn't anything to say. I got up each morning and taught Chemistry and Geometry until 5:30, when we took the bus home for dinner at the dorm house. While busy, my days just weren't all that interesting. On Friday, my aunt, uncle and grandparents arrived from Xiaguan and we met them for dinner at a Japanese restaurant with some friends of theirs who had spent time in Beijing. They told us some good places to eat and gave us some guide books to help us on our trip. After dinner, my cousins wanted to go to youth group, but I had a lot of repacking to do before the next morning. So I opted to go back to the dorm. Which meant I had to go alone. It may not seem like such a big thing, but it was momentous to me to be traveling alone by public bus in a Chinese city of more than 3 million. I was alone, the sole caucasian on the bus, unable to communicate with anyone else. But I felt comfortable. It was the same bus route I took home every day after MSG and I had been the only caucasian before. It went just fine.
The next morning we left for the airport with all of our bags. It was a fairly short flight to Xi'an- we arrived late in the afternoon. After a mix-up involving our driver, we ended up taking taxis to the youth hostel we were staying at. The hostel was a quaint, cute little place. When we checked in, they warned us Saturday nights at the bar were pretty loud and that we might want earplugs. We nodded and laughed to ourselves as we went out for dinner. We ate Xi'an style noodles- wheat noodles with soggy bread crumbs. I was about the only one who liked them. Mostly my family thought the bread didn't go so well with the noodles. The hostel gave vouchers for a free beer for everyone each night, so after dinner we all sat in the bar and drank our free beers. It was pretty quite, and so we figured the women at the counter had been exaggerating about the noise. But when we were showered and getting in bed, all of a sudden the music got louder, someone started beating on bongo drums, and the karaoke began. Since we had first floor rooms directly over the bar, the music was incessant and impossible to ignore until nearly 12:30. We had to wake up on time in spite of that, because we had made plans with a driver to visit the Terra Cotta Warriors. It was a couple hours from Xi'an to the Warriors. The driver obligingly agreed to wait for us in the van, and we went out to buy our tickets. We ended up hiring a tour guide at the ticket counter, who took us around the three different pits and telling us a bit of the history. The site was the tomb of the first emperor of the Qing dynasty- the man also responsible for the Great Wall. Shortly after his death his tomb was burned and partially destroyed by a peasant revolt. Thus most of the warriors were found in disrepair and had to be pieced back together. They were found by farmers digging a well in 1974, and since them a huge amount of tourism has grown up around them. After visiting the warriors, our driver took us to the factory where the replicas were made, from the actually clay found inside the pits. They showed us how they molded them, touched up the details, and baked them in a huge kiln for a week. The shop there also had lacquered tables and screens, silk embroidery artwork, carved wood, and silk carpets. The next day we were able to take it easy (fortunately the bar had been much quieter the next night) and get a late start to our morning. We rented bicycles and rode them the full circle around the ancient Xi'an walls. The ride would have been quite enjoyable if not for the rain. We also walked through downtown to the Muslim quarter, which had a myriad of roadside snack stalls and restaurants. We were looking for a mosque, but it took us until nightfall to locate it. The next day we had to get up even earlier, as we had a plane to catch. But on the way to the airport we stopped at a newly discovered tomb called the Yangling Mausoleum. On the site were two burial mounds: one for the emperor, one for the empress. Radiating from the emperor's tomb were long pits of varying length. Each contained various different items depending on the government official buried there- clay animals and now-carbonized grains for the emperor's dietician, clay men, women, and eunuchs for the man in charge of the harem, and so on. The mausoleum had been made into quite a nice museum. We enjoyed walking through it.
The flight to Beijing was even shorter than that to Xi'an, but it took almost an hour to make it to our hotel from the airport because of the city traffic. Beijing is a phenomenally huge city, I discovered immediately. One taxi driver told us 8 million inhabitants, another 13 million. Either way, the city is enormous. We're staying in apartment-style rooms at a hotel called Lido Place. It was too late to do much on Tuesday when we got here besides get dinner. We ended up sleeping in Wednesday morning, so it was after 11 by the time we made it to Tiananmen Square. For such a huge area, Tiananmen is surprisingly barren. Mao Zedong's tomb is in the center, and there are huge television screens showing patriotic Red propaganda, but for the most part, the Square is just empty pavement, filled only by the large number of tourists milling around almost purposelessly. Directly across from the Square is the Forbidden City, with it's huge portrait of Mao hanging in the center. After a quick walk around the square, we went and explored the once-forbidden home of the Emperor of China. While in many ways grand and majestic, in a lot of ways the place seemed sparse and lonely. For the safety of the Emperor, as well as to preserve is god-given divine right, many places even inside the already restricted fortress were off-limits even to the princes. Only the Emperor and those he expressly called could enter some of the courtyards. Even in the common areas, things were so lonely. Each building was surrounded by its own wall like layers of an onion, and separated from every other building by long, empty courtyards of paved stone. I wouldn't like to live there, not for all the riches, power, and prestige of the Emperor. We went back to the apartment after seeing the Forbidden City, and went out for dinner at a Tex-Mex restaurant down the road that a friend of the Blackburns recommended. The food was superb. This morning we hired a driver to take us to the Great Wall. The drive took us way up into the mountains. At the base of the wall, in the parking areas, wait shop after shop of men and women all hoping to sell their souvenirs to you. "Hello. I have hats and gloves." "Hello. Cold water." "Hello, souvenirs $1." "Hello. Do you like?" Each time you shake your head, smile, keep walking. "Hello, hello, hello." Grandma and Grandpa took a gondola to the top, but the rest of us wanted to say we walked up. It was a lot of stairs up, but the view was worth it. In about 2 or 3 weeks, I hear the trees will start to bloom, and I can imagine the view from the top must be marvelous then. But it was marvelous now, even dry and mostly brown. The wall is pretty impressive in its sheer size and location. Imagining carrying those bricks up that entire mountain, building mile after mile of wall... Incredible. After the Great Wall we visited the Emperor's Summer Palace, a lovely Asian castle beside a man-made lake, with trees and pagodas and covered pathways and buildings with lovely sounding names like "Pavilion of Birdsong" or something similar. The number of tour groups here was incredible, and we all expressed our wholehearted thanks that we were not part of such a group. Traveling by tour group would be no way to travel! Now that the Great Wall and the Forbidden City are over, we have two days here to see anything else we're curious about. We've talked about a place called the Temple of Heaven, talked about seeing the supposed embalmed body of Mao in his tomb in Tiananmen, talked about seeing the Bird's Nest Olympic stadium. Who knows what else is in store in my last few days in China, but I'm sure I'll love them.
