Rub My Pey Yow. Come on, you know you want to.
Trip Start
May 22, 2005
1
75
107
Trip End
Jan 22, 2006
Xi'an,
China
Sunday, October 30, 2005
Mel's Dad had organized a private tour for just the four of us. Our first tour guide was a friendly chap who was supposed to be able to speak Cantonese. Unfortunately, his Cantonese consisted mainly of Mandarin spoken with a strange accent. We had to depend on Mel's Mom to translate. One of our special requests for the tour was that there were to be no stops at places that tried to sell you crap. We told them that we had zero tolerance for this. At least we (being Paul and Mel) had no tolerance-Mel's parents, we believe, secretly wanted to visit them all.
Our first stop in Xi'an was the city walls where we stopped for a quick tour of a feng shui museum
01 - Terracotta Warriors
. We were suspicious from the outset. Mel's parents happily went in. At the end of our "tour", our guide showed us the great and mythical Pey Yow, which is basically a lion-like creature with a bad case of constipation. The Pey Yow was thought to bring wealth because it was "all in and no out". If you rubbed its ass, you would be good as gold. Predictably, the "tour" ended at a showroom where you could invite a Pey Yow to come home with you. We immediately complained to our tour guide. Mel's parents ended up buying eight Pey Yows of varying sizes during the rest of the trip. In other words, Paul was left carrying eight rock statues across China.The Terracotta Warriors did not disappoint. 8,000 warriors and horses, spread over three pits, each crafted to appear unique and different. 720,000 workers toiled for over 37 years to build this stone army for Emperor Qin Shihuang. Wouldn't it have been more useful to have the 720,000 workers make something that you could use while you were alive? They could have built one heckuva deck or something. The warriors were discovered by a farmer in 1974 while he was digging a well. Now the guy autographs souvenir books at the gift shop. It takes five years for the archeologists to reassemble just one of the warriors. So if we went back in say 20 years, there would be four whole new warriors to see. We will probably skip that one.
At night we visited the very festive and lively Muslim Quarter in Xian (there are over 130,000 Muslims in Xi'an). The street was filled with food vendors selling delicious-smelling cakes, fruit, and roasted and barbequed meats. We had already eaten dinner but we still tried our fair share of the local grub. Mel and her mom again struck out to do some shopping and we spent lots of time looking for dresses.
The last few things we saw in Xi'an was the Banpo Museum dedicated to a matriarchical society that existed in the area from 4,800 to 4,300 BC. We also visited the Big Wild Goose Pagoda, which is a beautiful seven story pagoda originally built to house Sanskrit scripts.
