Xi'an
Monday August 9, 2010
So here I am in Xi’an, in the raucous Hanwood Hostel, a place just south of the Big Goose Pagoda, presided over by a manager who is as friendly as he is overbearing, and a band of almost impossibly perky and upbeat staff. My room is what you would expect of a solitary confinement cell in some enlightened nation where they ardently believed that prison is about reform and not about punishment. That is to say, it is small and cell-like, with a bare concrete floor, but it has a solid but functional bed, somewhat elegant and very comfortable bedding, and with the welcome addition of air-conditioning.
It’s a chatty place, the Hanwood hostel. And through my conversations here, I am realising that, when it comes to Chinese, I have reached that awkward point at which, in my better moments, I speak well enough to get myself into deep waters, but not well enough to navigate the aforementioned waters with much skill. I put together a few half-way competent sentences, and the person I’m talking to assumes that I’m doing rather better than I am, so launches into a long treatise on something or other that I only partially follow. In fact, it may not be linguistic skill at all, but rather the skill of being able to pull the right kind of thoughtful faces at what I judge are the right moments.
Nevertheless, despite these rather too frequent exercises in bafflement, I am enjoying Xi’an. Behind the hostel, in the few backstreets that have not yet been turned into some kind of weird Tang dynasty theme park (it is only a matter of time, indeed there is in fact a weird Tang Dynasty theme park just up the road, a place that might be weird enough to merit a visit, and given the theme-park feel of the area, it’s a kind of theme park within a theme park…) there are some great places to eat for a matter of pence: I had home-made noodles this evening, fried with a spicy sauce, and sat at a rickety table on the pavement writing. And in the opposite direction, every evening, there is a dancing fountain display by the Big Goose Pagoda, something that is impressive in its way, and made much more fun by the fact that nobody heeds the public safety warnings, and so the fountains are full of people larking around and getting soaked to the skin.
My main preoccupation at the moment is getting train tickets sorted for the rest of my journey. I now have a new train ticket strategy, which goes roughly like this. First of all check the train lines on the very useful cnvol.com. Next select the trains that I’d like to go on and write down all the details. Then head to a booking window – not the main station, which is chaos almost everywhere – first thing on the morning exactly ten days before I intend to travel, and try to sort a ticket with the help of my list of favoured trains. I’ll see how well this works tomorrow morning, but hopefully I’ll be able to get from Tianshui to Anyang – my only remaining long-distance journey – without another hard seat.
Meanwhile the stories continue to come at a fairly steady rate, which is gratifying. I’ve cracked the difficult no. 18, I think, which has been bugging me for months. It’s not fully written yet, but the idea is now resolved. It’s good to have that one more or less sorted out. The story that was occupying that slot was terrible, and can now be consigned to the great wastebin in the sky.
Meanwhile, I’ve been playing with WordPress, getting a website set up for the fun creative writing collaboration that I’ll be setting up between Zhongshan University in Guangzhou and De Montfort. It should be a whole lot of fun, but we need to get a solid platform for the collaboration sorted out before or shortly after the term starts. So I’ve been putting my webmaster hat on (a hat that, I’m glad to say, I don’t wear very often these days) for a while, to get something up and running.
Tomorrow I’m finalising train ticket plans, and heading to the history museum here in Xi’an. The day after will be the obligatory visit to the terracotta army. After that, I’m heading West again to Tianshui.
For now, however, I’m off to bed. The guy opposite me, who has been earnestly trying to teach me about the wonders of Chinese culture, has ceased showing me photos every two minutes, and is now playing mournful traditional Chinese tunes on his laptop, and singing along for my edification.
Unforeseeable At the Shaanxi First Demonstration Model in Adolescent Moral Education
#1 · kathz
Monday August 9, 2010
Please go to the Tang theme-park – it may have roundabouts with horses like the wonderful ceramics of that period. I want to see photos and hear a full account.
#2 · Elee Kirk
Tuesday August 10, 2010
I agree. If you’ve had enough of temples, then the least you can do is immerse yourself fully in Chinese kitsch. The dancing fountains are only the beginning!