Walking around Xi'an
Trip Start
Jul 24, 2005
1
5
27
Trip End
Aug 20, 2005
Xian, China
Thursday, July 28, 2005
We walked from there to the History Museum and thought about going in, but Yoong has seen enough "dings" - ancient food vessels - and other such artifacts to last the rest of the trip. We then visited the library, where we did some e-mail, checked out a Tang Dynasty tourist place that has a dinner show every evening and decided it wasn't for us, then stopped at a well-known dumpling house for lunch. Lonely Planet has it as "Wei Wei's" but it now calls itself "Me Me's". We had a big serving of freshly made pork and chive dumplings which came with a dish of little bits of tofu with spring onions, a wonderful concoction of enoki mushrooms and a kind of glass noodle salad. All that with a big bottle of cold beer came to what it costs us for one small serving of dumplings at the popular Shanghainese restaurant near us in North Point. We walked to the Little Goose Pagoda and as far as the walls of the city. By this time it was scorching hot and Yoong was getting grumpy so we got a bus back to the hotel for a rest.
In the evening we did a long walk to the original backpacker hostel in Xi'an. Why anyone would want to stay in such an out-of-the-way location is beyond us. There are plenty of cheap and decent hotels here near the railway station and even in the center of town. We chose to do the first part of the walk inside the city wall. Although there were some interesting street scenes it was all a bit grubby and we wouldn't walk that way again. Most of the walk was along a long tree-lined avenue, which seems to be fairly standard in Chinese cities now. It seemed to take forever to reach the hostel, where we found Kane's Caf? was open, but Dad's Home Cooking had closed down. We checked Kane's menu but decided we didn't need pseudo-Western food, especially as it was almost time for the last bus back to the station. We had done enough walking already.
While we waited for the bus, we bought some dumplings from a nearby stall. They were excellent. We ended up buying ten of them - some with pork, some with vegetables and, the best, stuffed with mushrooms. It was enough dinner for me, but Yoong stopped for some pull-noodles after the bus got us back to the station while I went back to the hotel. Otherwise I would have been tempted to share her noodles, which, she assured me, were very good. So it was a day with a lot of walking and a bit less eating than the last couple of days.
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