The trip out to the airport was uneventful, but when we arrived at the airport, security had been significantly beefed up over night because of a terrorist attack in the western part of China that had killed 31 people and injured 91. As well as the usual laptop search, today they wanted to separately scan all the cameras (3 of them) battery chargers (3 also), all the credit cards in my money belt, and give every person a complete scan with their wand. Anything that beeped got investigated, and put back through the x-ray scanner. There was a man and a woman at each security machine, so everybody got the same treatment.
If you are looking at the photos on Flickr, let me apologise
if the order of them seems a bit illogical.
The internet here isn’t completely open as I’ve mentioned, and one of
the things that is suffering is that I only have partial access to Flickr. I can upload photos ok, and put them into
sets, which is how they attach to links on the blog, but I can’t see the order
they are going into the sets in, so they look to me like that are a bit random.
One of our concerns before we left for China, was would
there be any English spoken at all, and how would we cope when we were left on
our own. So far, we’ve done pretty well,
as I’ve mentioned all the menus have pictures, all the ones we’ve come across
so far also have English titles, Chinese use numbers for numbers, and most
restaurant staff know how to say some numbers, so communicating has been quite
easy. Sitting in Beijing Airport, all
the announcements are also made in perfectly clear English, so it hasn’t been a
problem at all.
The flight to Xian, was on China Eastern Airlines on a brand
new AirBus A321, so that allayed one totally unfounded fear about what the
quality of the planes might be like. We
did feel a bit sorry for the Chinese locals because the seat numbers are also
written as 24A,B,C,J,K,L etc, so the numbers are Ok for them, but the actual
seat is often a character they’ve never seen, so we did see a few of them
holding up their tickets to the numbers on the overhead lockers to try and
figure out which was their seat.
Arriving in Xian, we were met by Helen, our guide for the
next 3 days, and Wu our driver. Xian
airport is about an hour away from the city centre, and immediately on our
journey, we got the feeling that Xian was a more loveable city that
Beijing. The buildings were much
prettier, the traffic more ordered, and the place just generally felt cleaner
and more inviting than Beijing ever really did.
We always felt safe in Beijing, but just driving around it, it always
just felt like one big unstructured, unloved mess of buildings, shops and
offices, which was only saved by the
wonderful historic monuments, and the old world charm of the Hutong District
where we stayed. We were sorry to leave
our hotel, which was such a wonderful sanctuary right in the middle of Beijing.
Our hotel in Xian, is the Bell Tower, and is oddly enough
right beside the Bell and Drum Towers in the centre of the city. Directly over the road is a massive shopping
mall, and just 300 metres down the road is the South Gate of the city
walls. Xian is a completely walled city,
and the walls are a 13km trip, which you can hire a bike and ride according to
Helen, and we will have the opportunity to do that if we wish. The hotel itself is very nice, clean, a bed
made of a single piece of solid granite, but by the second night we were
getting used to it, and so handy to restaurants, bars, markets, and the Bell
and Drum Towers, which are beautifully lit up at night.
No comments:
Post a Comment