Xi’An – Day 2

We slept in for a bit and then went to get our free breakfast at the hotel. It was actually pretty nice: scrambled eggs, steamed buns, weird Chinese sausages, fried cabbage, etc. It was pretty good for the price we paid for our room. The Xi’An City Center Hotel was really worth the bang for the buck! After breakfast we relaxed a bit longer in our room before checking out at noon. Today was just as hazy and polluted as the day before (yuck!). We mailed off some postcards and got to hear “P.I.M.P.” blaring from the post office main square – nice, China! We also peeked at the Bell Tower which is right next to our hotel, but there really wasn’t anything to see, especially with all the pollution. So we then caught bus 609, as recommended by our hotel, to the Xi’An History Museum. Well, our hotel didn’t tell us that the bus actually didn’t pass right by the museum. Lucky for us, we used our heads (and our guidebook map) and picked up from the few English signs in the city that we wouldn’t be going directly past the museum. So, instead we got off at the Great Goose Pagoda area. This was inside a Buddhist Temple complex. We paid the entrance fee and moseyed around for a bit. We saw the large pagoda, which I think was 15 stories tall?, but didn’t pay the extra fee to go up it. After walking around for a bit we navigated our way over towards the history museum. We stopped for lunch along the way, getting a pork and mushroom dish and, our new signature dish, sweet and sour chicken. We also got to see some dude working on a helluva mess of power lines. His buddy held a ladder while he climbed up onto the power lines, which were all tangled and knotted and looped. We couldn’t believe the mess they were! And here was this guy scooting along, climbing over and through these wires. He must have had some balls! Anyway, we crossed the street and headed into museum. There was a special line for foreigners at the ticket booth, so we grudgingly commented to each other that we would probably have to pay double the entrance fee. Lo and behold though, it ended up being free for us after we showed them our passports. The museum itself was better than we had expected, although had only a small fraction of their 370,000 piece collection on display. Nevertheless, there was a substantial amount of items, particularly some great collections from early Chinese dynasties, since Xi’an was the capital for nearly a millennium. The early jade works, pottery, and bronze works were all fantastic. Some of it extended all the way back to the Shang Dyanasty (16-11 cent. B.C.) We finished up not long before closing time and returned to our hotel where we picked up our luggage and took the Bus to the station. The place was absolutely swamped. This was still several weeks out of the Chinese New Year, but already there are tons of people trying so hard to obtain tickets home (the nearly 250 million migrant workers in the large cities). We ended up in line for our train and struck up a conversation with a couple from Australia who were in the midst of a two month trip from the UK back home to Australia. They had taken some time on the Trans-Siberian railroad and highly recommended it to us. We ended up boarding late due to the fact that our train was just stopping in Xi’an on its way from Lhasa to Shanghai, a trip of three days. Yuck. The car we were staying in also had two guys who, we believe, had been riding since Lhasa. They seemed to have been struck with some cabin fever, and I can’t say I blame them. Our train took off and we made our way to Shanghai.