Day 8 – Xian – Museum, Art Gallery & Cycling the city walls

Xian traffic might be more in control than Beijing traffic, but that doesn’t mean that it in any way resembles the sort of traffic we have in New Zealand.  Looking out our hotel window, we look down on the town’s central roundabout, which has roads entering it from the 4 points on the compass, and rotating in about 4 separate lanes.  All manner of vehicles and pedestrians negotiate this large round about, scooters, cyclists and motor cyclists – all without lights at any hour of the day or night.  The same take a very liberal not only to which lane they should be in, but also which way the traffic lanes have been designated to flow in.  I can’t see down the street, but there is obviously something fascinating that the scooters, and 3 wheel mini vans have to get to, that is straight down the lanes heading in the opposite direction.  Traffic does travel quite slowly, and the main rule seems to be don’t do anything rash or quick, but don’t worry about following any particular road rules, and don’t worry about what other drivers are doing, but just don’t hit any of them. 

One quite cool thing in the traffic is that beside every set of traffic lights is a count down clock that tells you how long until the light changes – the numbers are red for a red light, and green for a green light.  When you stop at the lights, the counter starts counting down from whatever phase time has been set – the shortest we’ve seen in 16 seconds, the longest 96 seconds.  You can also see some of the other clocks, and there are quite big differences between them, so the light for one light might say it has 30 seconds until the green, but your one says there is only 15 seconds until it turns red, this is our equivalent of the turning arrows, and gives one particular light time for the cars who are turning across the traffic to go about their business.  It sounds organised, but there is a certain amount of “don’t be the first to blink”, with drivers barging through right behind the car in front, so nobody else can move.  It’s all fun, but I’m glad I’m not driving in it.

Helen and Wu arrived to pick us up at 9 o’clock this morning to take us on what turned out to be a very full and information packed day of sightseeing.  First stop was the provincial museum, which traces life in the district going back over 1 million years.  There were many interesting exhibits that demonstrated the sorts of societies that existed many millennia ago, and how people had developed societies, built tools, houses, made clay pots, farmed and even things like how they buried their dead.  Chinese society has always been focused around staying in one place and developing agricultural and horticultural solutions to enable them to survive and grow.  This is in direct contrast peoples like the mongos who were much more nomadic, and because of that, much more willing to go to war to expand the size of the territory they could roam in.

Our next stop was the Xian city walls, with its four main gates – North, South, East and West.  We arrived at the East Gate, took the steps up to the top of the wall, and hired a bike each to ride the 13 kilometres around the top of the wall.  The top of the wall is 12 – 15 metres in width, so about wide enough for a 3 lane road.  The trip round the wall took us about an hour and a quarter with lots of stops to take photos and look over the battlements, and over the inside wall into the city inside the wall.  Obviously, the city is much bigger than the area covered by the wall now (it’s over 6 million people), but all the buildings inside the wall are low-ish rise, and outside the wall are many high rise apartments.  Anne really enjoyed the ride, which was great because the top of the wall is all somewhat uneven cobble stones, so it wasn’t the ideal riding surface.

Lunch was an interesting affair, as we were taken to a theatre restaurant, which is where they do a local dance show each night and we had been offered the chance to see the show both by the travel agent in New Zealand, and by Helen when we met her.  Both times we had turned down the opportunity, but it seems you can’t avoid it in some way, so we were taken to the theatre for lunch.  And so there we sat, me and Anne, the only two people in this massive theatre, chatting quietly to ourselves.  The lunch was very nice, and the rather odd environment was just a bit of a laugh really.

After lunch, we went to a couple of different places – a museum of stone tablets with ancient Chinese calligraphy, a local market, the local Muslim quarter and its Mosque.  We’d done a lot of exercise, and taken in a lot of information over the course of the day, so were quite tired by the end of it all.  To  relax, we went out and found a bar to sit and have a couple of beers for a few hours.  We finished at about 9am, and then went off to find a restaurant, but the people of Xian obviously don’t eat late, because all the restaurants we went to were closed, so we settled for enjoying our beer dinner for the evening.