Day 41

31/5/2013

Xian

A disappointing change.

At arrival in Chengdu I immediately purchased my ongoing ticket for Xian, about 850 km north east of Chengdu. Often the staff of a hostel will take care of it and for the cost of a $1.50 they will get the ticket for you. When the chap went out to get the ticket he returned within three minutes meaning that he didn't get it from the station but elsewhere. Yesterday I found that the railway ticket office was you 100 meters down the street. I thought that I might as well pay them a visit to see if I could purchase my Xian to Beijing ticket there as well. The girl at the ticket office did not speak English but got on the phone to someone who did.

Yesterday was May 30, my train to Mongolia leaves early morning on June 4, leaving me with four days of vistiting places whilst travelling at night. I had planned two days in Xian and two days in Beijing. At the ticket office I found out that my planned night train for June 1 was completely booked out. There were some places left the following day leaving me with only one day in Beijing.

Xian is world famous for its Terracotta warriors which were discovered some years ago. Just below ground level there were 1000 of statues.

The Terracotta Army or the "Terra Cotta Warriors and Horses", is a collection of terrcotta sculptures depicting the armies of Qin Shin Hung, the first Emperor of China It is a form of funerary art buried with the emperor in 210–209 BC and whose purpose was to protect the emperor in his afterlife.

There are over 8,000 soldiers, 130 chariots with 520 horses and 150 cavalry horses, the majority of which are still buried in the pits

I had to make a choice of missing the warriors or missing the main sights of Beijing.

In the end I had to make a disappointing decision resulting that I would be in Xian just two hours.

The warriors have to wait .

The train left last night at 21.15 precise and arrived in Xian at 12.10 today, a journey of 850 km taking 15 hours. The low average speed is due mainly due to that the route goes through the mountains, so again there were long periods of tunnels and slow speeds because of the twists and turns.

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I had about two hours to kill in Xian. Once there I tried to find a Wifi connection but no such luck.

The next train left at 14:15 pm and will take me to Beijing , a journey of another 16 hours. Train travel is relative cheap at around $30-40 for an 800-900 km distance.

Now for something else. I wondered how Chinese people handle computers as there are 1000’s of Chinese characters. This would require a 5 meters long keyboard or a normal keyboard with perhaps 100’s of choices of little bit of letters. Thus far I had seen that the keyboards they use are the same as we use.

When the guy at the reception checked the train details for me he got online and looked and worked a page entirely written in Chinese. The way it goes, is like this. First of all a Chinese person has to learn and know the Latin alphabet, he then phonetically starts to type a word. For example he want to type in Xian so he types Xi and immediately on the side of the screen appears a list with Chinese characters all with words starting with Xi; somewhere in this list is Xian and when you click on that word it inserts the Chinese characters for Xian. Very tedious but they are used to it and do it very quickly.

Sound difficult but for them relatively simple

Now if I could find the words for : Could you stop talking for a while or simply just shut up, that would help.

As mentioned before and shown on the pictures there are 3 x 3 bunks facing each other. This time I got the lower bed , on the other side is a man of about 40. The two beds above me on either side have four women of around 25-35 years old. This lot talked all night from 20:30pm when I boarded, until at least midnight and started again at 6 am. Anyway a translation program would probably not help as they don’t speak the Chinese I hear all day. Perhaps they come from an area where they speak a different language. After all, China is a country which consist of many former independent countries with, I assume, have their own language.

P.M.

I had a bit of a breakthrough this morning. The Chinese are not a very friendly lot and not outgoing unless you approach them first. I tried to communicate with the man opposite me and it turned out that he knew a few words of English. But every time he started to say something he changed back into Chinese after a few words. I got my laptop and showed him a few maps, he understood but the women who had now stopped talking had not much of an idea what the were looking at. Many people do not know how to read a map.

I carry with me a small photo album of my children and all the grandkids. As soon as I showed them it broke the ice. They started to show pictures of their kids as well.

Guessing someone age is very difficult from either side. They refuse to believe that I am 63 and usually say around 50. This is understandable because we go by wrinkles, shape of the face, grey hair etc . I hardly see a grey China man or one with facial hair for that matter. People look a bit strange at me when they see that I have hair on my arms, they don’t.

The woman sitting next to me I took as being 24-27 years old. Then she said that she was 39. Her husband was in the section next to her and joined us for a while. They had two kids one of 16.

To them I must look like a giant. At one stage people started to line up to take pictures of me.

When waiting in the station in Xian there was an announcement, everyone got up and lined up at the gate. Two about 16 year old girls stood in front of me. At one stage one of them looked around and then at me; I saw the shock in her eyes, she quickly did a few small steps sideways. I suppose a 16 year old in Brisbane who has never seen an Asian would do the same if they suddenly saw a semi summo wrestler behind them.