OK. So there's a bit of catching-up to do.

Shopping in China

When shopping for clothes is an activity that can hold even my interest, you know there's something to it. Walking around Beijing (or, I'd imagine, just about any other Chinese city) off the tourist track reveals a wealth of stores selling really cheap clothes with great designs. I bought a shirt featuring the standard Che Guevara head shot and the following statement:

Revolution
EQUIPMENT TYPEAUTHENTIC
MIGR URIAN SURNIV ALURAND
NO. 01963 KNFOR

THE SPECIAL UNIFORM MADEUY PEOPLE WHOAOANST THE WORLD

FIGHTING

FORPEACE

Nice, soft fabric, too. I can't remember how much I paid for it. Probably about a dollar.

August 29

This was a travel day, so we didn't plan to get up to much.

Really big Buddha

On the way to the Beijing airport for our flight to Xian, we stopped off at the Lama Temple.

Now, here's the thing about temples: they're basically all the same. No, really. When you read a guidebook about some Asian country, it'll probably recommend a bunch of temples, and they'll all be really neat temples, and in basically the same way.

The Yonghe Lamasery is a bit special because it's Lamaist (don't get much of that in Japan), and it's home to a really big Buddha. We weren't allowed to take pictures, but you can see it here. Those rooms you see in the background are full-sized, like a person could stand up there and everything.

The complex also featured pictures of various Lamas throughout the ages, and told the story of China and Tibet and how China has always helped Tibet prosper and flourish. For some reason not a whole lot was said about the current Dalai Lama.

To Xian!

Not "shan" or "zyan" or short for "christian", but "she-an". Both syllables are high tone, so when you say it out loud use your best falsetto. Home to some really important archeological finds and free city-wide dial-up internet.

Straight out of the arrival gate at Xian we were approached by a lady who tried to get us to use her taxi. She succeeded, because we couldn't find any other taxis around anywhere, and we sure as hell weren't going to go to the information desk for help after our experience in Beijing. She showed us her taxi driver license with her picture on it, and verified that she used a meter, which was all good. Except that she didn't drive the taxi--her boyfriend did. The card she had was forged, and he was the one with the license--which had expired sometime last year. The taxi sign had been removed from the top of his car, and he hid his meter under my feet in the passenger's seat, presumably so that people from the cab company wouldn't be able to see it.

But he was nice, he got us to our hotel, and charged us a fair price according to his hidden meter. It looked like they were a young couple, so maybe they were just engaging in a little bit of fraud so that they could work on building a nest egg. What could be wrong with that?

Photography as performance art

We got to our Xian hotel after nightfall, and after settling in we took a bit of an evening stroll outside the southern face of the city wall (built in the Ming Dynasty, the wall still surrounds the central part of the city, which is very cool but isn't such a great thing for traffic patterns). We ended up at the South Gate of the city wall, where there's a bit of a public square that happens to be extremely busy in the evening. We set up our tripod so that Kate could take some night shots of the Gate, and this attracted a fair bit of attention from the crowd, which was by and large quite poor. First one kid started staring at us, and then another man joined him, and it kept building until we had an audience watching us take pictures.

Having half a dozen guys crowd around behind Kate, staring at the LCD screen on our not-top-of-the-line-but-not-very-cheap-either camera, made me a little nervous, but I think they were mostly just curious, and they did a pretty good job of staying out of the way of our pictures.

There were also two very large groups of people, each singing the sorts of songs we heard at the Temple of Heaven. By "very large" I mean maybe a hundred or so each.



After we put the camera away and started to continue our walk, our audience dwindled and thankfully dispersed. I brandished our tripod as a makeshift club just to make sure. (Eventually we started to think of Xian as being a relatively safe city, until we heard through the traveler grapevine about a girl whose wallet was stolen there.)