I am writing this on the tour bus as we drive through the Xi'an countryside. Believe it or not, the sun is shining and there is not a cloud in the sky. We have gone to a few gardens today and so they are very beautiful, with many birds twittering and chirping. There are cute little sparrows hopping about on the tops of gates and rooves.

[Mei thought I was kind of funny for how I was so interested in birds. My attention would always be drawn to them, whether it was a flock flying silhouetted over the city or a little bird in a cage hanging in Dayan park. "You're not here to look at the birds," she said once - but I like birds. ^_^.]

Yesterday's itinery was as follows: to a place honouring the guy who founded Buddhism, to a hill where some military leader once hid (Lintong?), to another jade store where we had lunch, to a garden and tomb of the (first) emperor of China, to the terracotta warriors.

Before I talk about that I'll write a little about the train [from Beijing to Xi'an]. It was a really good trip. I didn't feel sick at all, and one of the four beds in our compartment [we got four-bed instead of six-bed compartments, yay!] was vacant, leaving more room for us, which we needed due to the immensity and great weight of our luggage! It was hard work lugging our stuff so far down the platform, let alone up the steps. [Nobody helped us.]

The station waiting area was packed full of people, mostly men, among whom I was the only foreigner. Some sat on their luggage and slurped hot noodles from saucepans. The atmosphere was very Chinese - all sorts of people from different places.

Our compartment-mate was a 26-year-old guy 'Spring', who, believe it or not, is an English teacher at a university. He has to go from Beijing to Xi'an weekly to teach, I think. His English was very good, and I think he was a bit of an anglophile - he had all these English textbooks, music tapes and spoken English tapes. So it was really good to be able to properly talk to someone, and the three of us talked quite a bit. [What luck, huh! We got the one guy on the whole train who could speak English, and he was probably pleased too, to be able to practise his English.]

I'm always happier when I've made real contact with someone - Chang Ping, this guy, an Australian couple on our bus today... Because most days I sit in the background while Mei talks to people; I guess I miss communicating with and being friendly with other people.

So we talked, about our jobs/study, about our guilty secrets, about what we'd done in China so far, that sort of thing. We also played Yahtzee and a few card games. So I really enjoyed that train ride.

'Spring' told us that last week in Xi'an it was about 10 degrees C so I was happy, I wanted warmer weather. But when we arrived in Xi'an, not only was it colder than Beijing, it was SNOWING! We noticed snow outside the train on our way to Xi'an, and ducked outside at one stop for a quick photo, thinking we wouldn't get the chance to see it again.

It wasn't too difficult to sleep on the train but when I woke up I felt rather bruised and sore - the beds are far from soft. [I guess that's why they call it a 'hard sleeper'...] It was pretty hot on the train. [I got so hot getting my suitcase onto the train and never did cool down...] People occasionally walked up and down the aisle selling foods, but we brought our own.

One moment that particularly stood out was where Spring took out a tape player, said "I like this one very much" and proceeded to play Matthew 27, narrated in English. It was the last place I would have expected to hear the gospel being read aloud in English. Some time earlier he had asked if we believed in God and I said yes, definitely, and Mei said, we are both Christians. He didn't ask me any other questions on that theme and I didn't ask. Later, he helped us take our luggage off the train. He was nice.

(The toilets on the train aren't really worth mentioning, just a normal squat toilet with no paper, but it empties onto the tracks.) [I'd heard a horror story or two about toilets on trains but it was no worse than what I was already used to by then.]

Okay, so we arrived in Xi'an early yesterday morning (6:30am). My first impressions on arriving (through my bleary, tired mind):
It's snowing, look at all that beautiful swirling white!
It's so dark here, and kind of dirty...
Hey, that's a kid rifling through the garbage bins...
Thank goodness we can pay this lady to take our bags, I'm not going through *that* exhausting nightmare again.
Oh good, someone is here to meet us as promised. Bye Spring, oh, we're leaving each other so suddenly.
Ahh, snow! It's on the window frame of the car!
Man, this traffic BITES!

It took us about 15 minutes to get out of the (small) carpark, just sitting there stationary. Apparently traffic is much better on weekends, hmmm. [It was a weekend.] Our friendly driver told us that there are lots of weapons factories in Xi'an but no market for them now, so he and many others were out of jobs. The government only gave him about 190 yuan a month (because he had worked for them for a long time) so he took on the temporary driving job.

We went to our hotel room - three stars instead of two, and I'm very happy to be able to open my suitcase horizontally instead of peering down into it while crammed into a miniscule space between the bed and wall, as in the Beijing hotel. The bad point is that this room's toilet can't handle toilet paper, so we are blessed with the bad used-paper smell at all times in our room.

We were allowed to rest and settle in for about an hour before they came to get us for the tour.

The places we went to would have been very pretty even in winter - lots of trees, flowers, plants, old-style buildings. But because of the snow, they weren't just pretty, but *very* beautiful. It had only been snowing since the night before (the first snow of the season! Lucky or WHAT!) so it didn't completely blanket everything, just made it look nice; green and white look so good together. It looked very Christmasy.

Mei and I threw some snowballs, shook snow off tree branches, chucked snowballs in the air and hit them in midair so they dissolved, compared particularly beautiful and well-formed snowflakes that had fallen on our gloves, and just generally had fun with it.

[We had to have fun on the run though, doing all this while walking quickly through places. I have not seen snow since I was 7 years old; it never snows in Adelaide.]

It looks so beautiful falling, too. It doesn't fall down like rain, but kind of swirls delicately around, like tiny pieces of downy feathers. It is completely silent. Some of it comes in sideways [it kind of goes around in all directions] so you can't really shelter from snow; it blows in under shelters. You can hardly feel it touch your skin or head. They land on your clothes and quickly melt; people get them decorating their hair, looking kind of wholesome and beautiful, and when they melt they leave drops of water in your hair.

The phrase "falling flowering snow" is particularly appropriate, it reminds me of blossoms falling and is so wonderful. It makes a rather drab, dirty world look clean and pure and interesting and beautiful.

So the first two places on our itinery, I must admit, I was much more interested in admiring the snow than in admiring the glass cases of old relics, presented by someone speaking entirely in Mandarin, the occasional English sign posting nothing but the dryest facts, none of the meaty, interesting stories about the places we're looking at and the people relating to them. (Most places we have been to in China have had such a component - tour in room with relics and Mandarin-speaking tour guide - which I usually kind of wish I could skip to go look at nature outside.)

Lunch kind of sucked; the restaurant was dirty and expensive. Why force us to eat at such a place? The jade place was the usual deal - brief salespitch while they show us what their products are made from, then a big room full of glass cases showing overpriced merchandise we've seen ten times before - bracelets, pendants, larger figures, etc.

Then we went to the replication of some tomb; it was pretty amazing - catacombs, a huge room full of statues of people and things... also interesting were the pieces of information Mei translated, how one in ten Chinese men were conscripted to build this emperor's tomb, it took about 38 years (around the same length of time as his reign!) and all the builders were killed when it was done, so they couldn't divulge its secrets!

History is pretty horrible but it is interesting - at least, stories like that, not dates and lengths of reigns and stuff. And it comes alive when you are walking down a dark tunnel with emaciated corpses on your right and sharp weapons sticking up under the floor behind you.

Then we went to, I think, the site of the *actual* tomb of this emperor, which hasn't been opened. I think this emperor was the guy who united China as one nation, developed a common language and currency... he was also the guy who immortalised his army in clay near his tomb (the famous terracotta warriors). Qin Shi Huang's Tomb. This place was a garden going up a hill, beautiful of course. We had the mandatory tour-in-Mandarin-looking-at-signs-and-pictures-and-things-in-glass-cases deal, but I just wanted to look around and photograph the beautiful gardens.

Most of this trip has been very good, but one thing that really annoys me is how they cram so much into each day that we have to RUSH. I want to stroll around, drink it in, enjoy myself, but we're always in a mad hurry to get back to the bus on time; sometimes after the mandatory tour there's only a couple of minutes to go to the toilet, take photos, buy souvenirs, look at places you weren't taken into, etc. It's annoying! We pay good money to see these places, so they should let us SEE them! Sometimes it's quite reasonable, sometimes just an extra ten or fifteen minutes is all I ask.

[This happened in Beijing too. The tours we booked into originally did NOT cram too much into each day. Remember, our Beijing tour was originally five days, but they compacted it into three. And the Xi'an tour we signed up for was also changed - there weren't enough people in the tour we booked into so they put us in another group which was seeing about five extra places. I mean, it's nice to see more famous places but if you have to pay extra and don't get to *see* them properly... you know?]

But it was still nice there. We climbed the hill.

Then to the most famous Xi'an sight. There were a few hundred terracotta warriors. [The emperor Qin Shi Huang had a whole army replicated in clay to 'guard' his tomb, each individual man crafted life-size, each figure with a different face, a slightly different posture, some with different uniforms. Amazing!] It had taken 30 years to unearth and reconstruct (they were hollow and smashed to pieces when recovered) that many. Yet what we saw was less than 1/500th of the whole collection. [Just think how long it's going to take to recover and restore the collection - decades longer than it took to even make them in the first place!]

There were four big buildings in this place. The first had lots of warriors in trenches, the second, some warriors with heads, some without (much fewer than in the first stadium), the third was an excavation-in-progress - no statues, just holes and a few broken pieces that hadn't been put together yet. It also had a few particularly good, intact specimens of statue on display that you could look at up close. (Aside: originally, the statues were all *coloured* as well! It just faded over time, but you can still see traces on some, such as these well-preserved specimens. What a lot of work!)

The fourth building, I don't really know what it was about - lots of smaller statues and relics and stuff (found during the excavation of the warriors? I don't know).

That ended our tour.

Then Mei and I went out to get our tea and to find an Internet cafe. We found the latter surprisingly quickly, just down the next street. There were lots of guys playing computer games. The cost was only 2 yuan (40 cents) for an hour. I wrote a long email. [We soon found out how they could afford to charge 2 yuan an hour when we bought other things on that street at amazing prices.]

We had dinner at a small local restaurant selling some kind of regional food - Sichuan, was it? It wasn't bad but it was kind of hot. Mei didn't like it. She bought 2 yuan of biscuits at a little bread shop. The lady filled the bag so full - 36 cookies!! For that price in Australia you might get one or two.

My impression of Xi'an - do 6 million people really live here? We have passed a lot of countryside. In the city, it seems like there is a lot of... nothing. It's hard to describe. I mean lots of tall walls... buildings that seem to have no purpose... lots of construction work going on, lots of closed, barred buildings... lots of useless things to see, rather than the shops, company headquarters, restaurants and apartment buildings of Beijing - the buildings that mean *people*. There aren't so many people here. Of course there *are* plenty of shops etc but not so prominent as Beijing, I think. There are factory pipes spewing dark smoke, the blue sky is a kind of dull, greying light blue around the edges (pollution) and after the snow melted, everything was muddy and dirty. (Snow is slippery, by the way, but not as slippery as slushy, muddy melted snow!)

[This impression was just based on the streets we had passed in the first two days. The third day we saw more of the real city, where the people were, the shops and restaurants and all the rest of it.]

Things are generally cheaper here than Beijing, like the Internet cafe and cookies, and the taxis, which have 5 yuan instead of 10 yuan as minimum fare.

Okay, I'm FINALLY ready to write about today! I've written most of this entry in the last hour, and before then. It is now 6pm and it's getting hard to see; the sun set about half an hour ago. We are just coming out of the countryside, at least I think we are. Mei is talking and joking with half the bus.

Today's itinery was: Xian Yang museum, the old Tang capital, a museum/temple/garden for the only female ruler of China (Empress Wu), *another* jade store, a kind of reconstructed village place (Yangshao Village?), Qiang Ling mausoleum (the two tombs), a huge Buddhist monument, and Famen, a collection of Buddhist temples and stuff.

8:55pm

I'm feeling happy and comfortable now that we've had a good meal. It was sooo tasty. We found it on the cheap street just by the hotel, the same street where we had the hot beans and chicken, got the cheap cookies, and the Internet cafe. We got a pork dish, a chicken and vegetable dish, a fried rice each, and a kind of thick, oven-baked pancake with potato and carrots, plus the customary green tea. The total price? 17 yuan (about $4).

It was sooo delicious, especially the pork. The restaurant was a kind of hole-in-the-wall place - no perks, very basic, nothing but the essentials - concrete floor, three tables with stools, a vat for cooking the pancakes, tall thermoses of green tea... the restaurant measured about 2.5m by 6m, and the kitchen was about half the size of the eating room. There was no door, I could see right through the doorway in the stone wall to the kitchen. Lots of smoke, and they were cooking over a big fire. The main entrance to the restaurant didn't have a door either; the wall was just open at one end. And it was the tastiest meal I've had yet.

The pancake-thing wasn't quite so good. I don't like the way Chinese people only half-cook their potatoes. Mei said it's the sort of food poor people eat - indeed, it's almost sufficient for a whole meal on its own, and cost 0.5 yuan (12 cents).

I think they were surprised to see a foreigner in their little place. A little girl ran in and exclaimed "look, a foreigner!" (in Mandarin). Heheh, I like to be special.

Then we went back to the cake shop to buy more biscuits. Mei got 4 yuan worth (80 cents) and came out with a bulging bag - about 6 cupcakes and a few dozen biscuits. Definitely Cheap Street!

I want to record a) what places I went to, b) differences between Australia and China and c) any other interesting stuff. I want to be able to remember what China was like.

Xi'an is said to be the site of 73 emperors' tombs, but there are only 72 tombs because two were buried together - the only female ruler (Wu) and her husband. We saw these tombs on the second day in Xi'an, the Qiang Ling mausoleum.

The site of that mausoleum was a long uphill road lined with ancient statues. Many old statues have their heads missing, where people stole them to sell - in a number of places we have visited there are headless statues. I suppose that's one reason why one always sees guards around famous places.

There were two tombstones. The male emperor's stone was originally engraved with many words, while the woman's had none - she did not want an epitaph but to let people make up their own minds about her. Yet over the years, through history, miscellaneous people engraved their opinions on Empress Wu on her tombstone, while the epitaph on her husband's stone was gradually worn away. And so it ended up that the condition of the two stones was reversed - the empress' tombstone bore an epitaph and the emperor's epitaph was erased from his tombstone.

There's not that much left to say about the second day in Xi'an... the "village reconstruction place" we visited was a kind of... I don't know. [I think it was colled Yangshao Village.] It was a big area encircled by big stone walls, and in the walls were little 'houses' such as poor people would live in, and shops and stuff. There were some domestic animals like a donkey pulling a load, some chickens, a goat and a sheep, and we also saw a poor black bear stuck in a little, little cage. I don't like this cruelty to animals. There were also tunnels, in the walls of which were holes featuring model villages where the figures of people were arranged to illustrate various festivals.

We've seen several shrine-type places in the last week or so - big stone or metal or clay figures with cushions in front of them for kneeling, and a tray holding sticks of incense, the sickly sweet smell.

On that second day in Xi'an we went to a big Buddhist statue, but I didn't go right in because you had to bow and stuff. Famen had more Buddhist stuff, like the 'thousand Buddhas', a big wall-type thing inlaid with gold-coloured carvings of Buddha. Buddhist stuff kind of gives me a bad feeling, especially when I see people buying very expensive incense, and kneeling/bowing to the statues.

[I do not like the smell of incense; it makes me feel sick. But I don't see it very often. I saw the smouldering sticks with the smoke rising up to heaven and thought of that verse in Revelation about the prayers of the saints. The Christian equivalent of incense is prayers - that is what we send up to heaven. When we saw shrines or visited Buddhist places I found myself talking to God in my head, because they would make me think of religious things, and to thank God that I have a real hope in this world.]

10 Dec - Tue - 7:20pm

Okay, I've given up on the idea of keeping this diary complete and up-to-date. I'll just write bits and pieces.

We arrived in Shanghai late this morning. The train ride was alright, although more populated: we got a three-bed-high train. I had the top bunk, which is about two feet from the ceiling; you can't, say, sit up. But it was alright. I was more worried about falling out of bed - I was a couple of metres off the ground, and the bed was only 4 or 5 inches longer than the width of my body (how do fat people fit?) so if I had rolled over in my sleep I could have easily rolled straight over the little 'barrier' (not high enough to be effective as a barrier) and plummeted to the ground below.

Anyway, I *didn't* fall out of bed. I prayed that I wouldn't and then fell asleep comfortably. I've taken to praying about lots of everyday things. For example, the taxi to the Xi'an railway station - its boot, like most Chinese taxis, was very small (I have spent three occasions with a suitcase in the back seat, forcing me into a tiny cramped space) so they put my suitcase in the boot without closing it; it wouldn't shut.

I spent that whole trip praying "God, don't let it fall out. Don't let it fall out. Don't let that thump have been it hitting the road. Please don't let these people wandering around take it out when we're at a red light." But *all* of my prayers have been answered! [Even about the weather. Like the second day of our Beijing tour, it was *very* foggy in the morning, could hardly see a thing, and I prayed that it would clear up by the time we got to the Great Wall, because I certainly wanted to see that. Sure enough, although the Wall was in the mountains, usually more foggy, the fog had really cleared and that was the only time I saw some sunshine and blue sky in Beijing. Ditto with the fog in Hangzhou, it cleared up by the time we reached our destination. And I had prayed that we would get to see just one day of snow - enough to satisfy my wish to see snow but not so much that it would be problematic - and we did. And in Happy Kingdom in Shenzhen the clouds built up and smelled like they always do before rain - there was no way it couldn't rain, but it didn't.]

Again we met a nice person on the train. He had a vocab of maybe a couple of hundred English words, I think. So mostly, when he wanted to speak to me, Mei translated the Mandarin, and he'd also often say a couple of keywords in English. He lived and worked in Tibet for seven years, but only knew two words of the Tibetan language. His company makes tractor things - he showed us a photo - given as a gift by the Chinese government to work on Tibet's roads, so his company was paid by the Chinese government to work there.

He was 25 but looked a fair bit older; he had some grey hairs. Immediately he sat down on the corner of the bed nearest us; he had an open, friendly face. He was nice, too, helping various people with their luggage. He loaned me his laptop with some VCDs he liked, and I found myself enjoying Bollywood song-and-dance video clips. We told him some stuff about Australia and I gave him an Australian native animal calendar. He then spent some time finding a gift for me in return (I felt a bit guilty! but that's the custom) and presented me with a real souvenir from Tibet - a beaded bracelet with, I think, the 'heart of heaven' on each one? It means protection. But I'll think of it as meaning unexpected kindness. Chinese people are friendly, well, many of them are.

That was about an 18-hour trip. I slept for about 12 hours - well, as much as I could with that awful blaring music...

I've seen so many famous historical sites in such a short period of time that some of them have kind of blurred together. You could show me a picture of some famous statue or picture that I've seen and I would probably think "I might have seen it, but I've no idea where." And I don't know much about many of the places I have visited. I'll have to look them up when I get home.

Yesterday in Xi'an we saw more of the heart of the city, walking down the streets, taking taxis, etc. Tour arrangements have been strange; the first two days they stuck us in a different tour, where we had to pay extra money for the destinations not included on our real tour, the one we thought we were getting. On the plus side, we did get to see more, but they rushed us through some places.

View of Xi'an from the city wall

By contrast, on the third day we had a tour guide of our own - he said he rarely had a group of less than six, but now we somehow had our own personal guide for just the two of us. We saw the old city wall (the top is lit with fairy lights at night! It's very close to our hotel), a 7-tier Buddhist tower (Dayan) surrounded by other pagodas, monk's graves, etc (this temple is associated with the master in Journey to the West). And the forest of stone tablets, with lots of cool, old Chinese calligraphy.

After seeing these main sights, our guide took us down some smaller streets, where people had stalls and carts along the road, where there were motorised rickshaws, inexplicable food items, hanging meat, trinkets and all sorts - very local, colourful Chinese. Of course, not a foreigner in sight - I've seen relatively few white faces, especially on the streets (one sometimes sees them at famous sites).

I heard that Chinese sometimes stare at foreigners, and some do, especially when you're in non-touristy places like buses, train stations, local streets or hole-in-the-wall restaurants, but I stare at foreigners more than anyone, because I'm somehow hungry to see familiar faces or hear traces of a familiar language! I've been whole days without seeing an Anglo... funny; in Australia, there's such a variety of races that there's not really any race that would stand out as different from the general population. But everyone here is Chinese, or at least Asian.

Our guide took us to try the local Xi'an specialties. As usual I wasn't very hungry, but it was good to get the chance to try local food - the last two days, the tour guide brought us to expensive dumps where he could, presumably, earn commissions. We ate little, sticky, sugar cakes from a vendor (0.5 yuan), some vegetables fried up in a wok on the street before our eyes, and the main Xi'an specialty, a kind of soup with gelatinous noodles, lamb, and little flour balls. It wasn't bad, especially the lamb, but I can't say I loved it.

A trip is always made up, not just of activities and landmarks and meals, but of just little scenes, the landscape out the window of the bus, small things you see and then forget.

Like the boy tenderly holding a girl's face in both hands as she cried, on a busy Xi'an street, just like a scene off TV. Like the Xi'an McDonalds with pictures of cultural relics, and a copy of a terracotta warrior standing by the stairs. Like the crumbling, derelict, dirty, small houses in Beijing, where Mei said, "don't think the people who live here are poor, this land is worth a lot of money." Like the people who stand around in tourist places and get on your bus or tap on the windows, waving their one or two sole handfuls of merchandise. Like the birdcages hanging from tree branches - "you can't keep a dog or cat in an apartment building, so many people have birds. They like to take their pets to the park."

Like a young boy sitting on the side of the street, with one leg bent back behind his back, a sheet in front of him for money. Like two people carrying a chair with a person in it, into a restaurant. Like seeing a large, fluttering flock of birds winging freely across a dirty cityscape. Like the female train attendants who bark their words like soldiers, so grim-faced and sharp. Like lying awake in a Xi'an hotel room bed, hearing a phone ringing in the next room for the seventeenth time that night, and the continual, tremendously loud foghorn-like honk of trains leaving the station that is so near your room.

(Speaking of trains and loud noises, the Xi'an-Shanghai train was a lot harder to sleep on than the Beijing-Xi'an train. This was on account of a) the loud lady yabbering at the top of her voice in the next bed - why are Chinese people so loud? - but more b) the music. Being on the top bunk, I was on the same level as the speaker, which blared music at an unreasonable volume. Earplugs did not help. It would have been an uncomfortable volume even if I wasn't trying to sleep; I could only drift off after it stopped. Then it recommenced at 7am. So infuriating!)

Xi'an as compared with Beijing: it seemed colder, a little dirtier, cheaper... both have a lot of history, a lot to see, and a lot of culture in common; quite a few of the observations I made about Beijing also apply to Xi'an. Xi'an is smaller, and I don't think we spent enough time there to really get a good sense of the city, but from what I saw yesterday, it too has that peopled, interesting *life* to it.

I don't know if it's because Adelaide is a) a newer city, b) small or c) boring, or all three, but it's certainly not as interesting as these big Chinese cities. In Chinese streets you see here a person wearing a surgical mask, there a person, a grown man, kicking a feathered hackysack up and down in the air, there two people hitting a badminton birdie back and forth*. On this street there might be rows of shop after shop, then a street of large buildings, then a street with a small road for taxis and bikes and carts and hole-in-the-wall stores.

*[I suppose part of the reason for this is because the people actually live in the city, in apartment buildings. In Adelaide, if people want to recreate they do it in their yards, in the suburbs, not the city streets.]

There are many areas, especially in Xi'an, under construction, with canvas and scaffolding making an ugly street, there are skyscrapers with traditional Chinese pagoda-style rooves, there are kites very high in the sky, people spitting on the ground and making hacking noises like they're gonna die, there are people who walk right out into oncoming traffic with perfect calm, things seem more disorganised and unmanaged and alive. You can always see something interesting and unexpected; it's not the continual sameness of an Adelaide city street. But that doesn't mean I would want to live here.

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