The travels of Justin

A lot has happened since my last post, but I only have a few minutes to write so I can only tell you where I am now. Ryan and I took a train to Xi’an — home of the famous terracotta soldiers — that left Monday and took 23 hours to arrive. On the train, we made friends with almost everyone on our car. People watched me try to correct and improve my pronounciation of words and it really made it easy to talk to people. My best teacher was a 10-year old girl which is a good reminder of how limited my language skills are; although, as I’m getting more and more comfortable speaking, I can see what an easier time we’ve have than some of the foreigners we’ve seen. One doesn’t have to learn any words to get by, but it sure makes things more fun. If you’re going to travel in China, it would do you well to learn to speak numbers at the very least. My other favourite is “that is too expensive” which I assure you I say a lot.

On our first day here we simply walked around the downtown core of Xi’an. The ancient city has a a surrounding wall which means it’s harder to get lost than other places. There is a larger Islamic influence here and I want to visit the Muslum quarter today. I ate what I think is mutton from a Muslum bbq yesterday and it was great. Lots of steamed buns (bowzer) and other things in Xi’an, and even bubble tea! When we got off the train, the first restaurant we went into we ordered the soup everyone else seemed to be eating. The server dropped two empty bowls, each with 2-pieces of bread, in front of us. Seeing our blank stare, he grabbed the bread in my bowl and started showing me how to break it into small pieces. Once I was done, he gave the bowl of bread-pieces to a cook who added the soup, noodles, etc, which finally returned to me as an excellent lunch.

Yesterday we visited the terracotta warriors. They were really fantastic, but I’ll have to write again about that later as my time is up on this internet terminal. I have about RMB$45 left in my pocket, and my bank account is drained until my student loans show up. I don’t know why waiting for the loan money has been so slow coming, but it’s starting to be an issue. At least I know we’ll get home to Tianjin safely. Our train back is one day later than we wanted, so we need to pay for one more night here. Ryan will pay, and I can pay him back — it’s only CAD$15 per night — but if we can’t find a bank machine, we’ll be doing some creative problem solving. Should I be worried? Nah! This is a tourist city and there just has to be something. In fact, I’m just overhearing a conversation where another foreigner is getting directions to a bank that accepts Interac (a bank network Canadian banks use). Sounds like my answer has already arrived.

Having a great time in Xi’an!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 5th, 2005 at 5:53 pm and is filed under Life and living, Tianjin, China. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.