Very hot in Xian today. We were a bit more relaxed as we had no organised trip to attend, no guide to meet in the hotel lobby at a fixed hour. How cool to be able to organise your day the way you want to!! I went down to breakfast in better spirits even though I knew it would be very hot outside and a day in the dirty city was ahead of us.
We wandered the city at our own pace and visited more or less all the places worth seeing in Xian. We started with the Little Goose Pagoda, located near a temple originally built in AD 684 as a site to hold prayers to bless the afterlife of the late emperor Gaozong. The top of the pagoda was shaken off by an earthquake in the 16th century, but the rest of its high structure is intact. The surrounding park did not impress us too much so we consequently cut our visit short.
The next thing we went to was the Great Mosque, situated in the Muslim quarter. This mosque is supposedly one of the largest in China. The present buildings only date back to the mid-18th century, though the mosque might have been established several hundreds years earlier. Suprisingly enough, the mosque is actually built in Chinese architectural style (to my utter exasperation!) but it was overall quite a pictoresque place to be in as most of the grounds are taken up by gardens. Only the muslims were admitted in the prayer hall. To get to the mosque we had to survive an extremely narrow street, with very crowded stands, with the most varied merchandise ever, mostly imitations of world known brands. The sellers urging passers by to have a look at the things on sale in the few broken English words that they managed.
On escaping the narrow street, we took a taxi and went to the Forest of Steles Museum which houses the heaviest collection of books in the world. The earliest of the more than 2,000 large engraved stone tablets dates from the Han dynasty.
Other things which we visited were the Drum Tower and Bell Tower (with basically the same functions as the ones in Beijing) and the City Walls which Alex courageously climbed while I waited for him at the entrance.
The second part of the day was worse and ended with me having a fit in the hotel's Chinese restaurant. I am sick and tired of Chinese food (which I hated anyway, even before the trip to China). However, yesterday we tried the European restaurant and it turned out to be a bad experience (both of us got diareea right afterwards) so today we thought of having Chinese again (despite my reluctance). I was probably in a bad mood on entering the restaurant, which was rendered worse by the fact that only Alex got a menu, so I had to specifically ask for another one for me. It soon became bloody obvious that the waitress did not speak a word of English (well, she did understand water, fork, bill but that was about all!!). This was the first time in China when I actually saw a dog dish on the menu. On seeing that I really wanted to leave the restaurant at once and, if it had not been for Alex, I would have done it. Things being as they were, we tried to find something edible and I ordered a chicken based dish and Alex a duck based one, rice, and egplant. When the food was served, I nearly started to cry with frustration as it seemed to me that the chicken meat was, in fact, some other meat and all food was literally floating on a sea of oil. I am still not entirely convinced that what I ate was indeed chicken but Alex was so... I guess it does not matter anymore. I needed a lot of coaxing and comforting to be kept at the table but I confess that I ate very little this evening.
I cannot help the way I am and I admit that Chinese food, lifestyle, customs and traditions are and, I am afraid, will forever be strange and incomprehensible to me.
We are flying to Lhasa (in Tibet) tomorrow in the afternoon - that is, of course, if we will ever get the special permit needed for this adventure. We were promised by our guide here that we would get it today but it hasn't happened so far so... Probably tomorrow.
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