Xian

Before I finish with Beijing and move on to Xian, I have to mention the last few things we did in Beijing.  We, unsurprisingly, visited the Olympic sites like the Birdsnest, but we also took a rickshaw ride through a Hutong. All of Beijing used to be divided into little neighborhoods called Hutongs where extended families lived together and where the people banded together in a sort of large family group (though not all were related).  Most of these are gone now, though. Progress has essentially meant that people have moved out of Hutongs into large apartment buildings where they have lost the sense of belonging that they had in the Hutong.  (Our guide Jerry and his wife, who are expecting a baby, live in one of these large apartment complexes. We thought we had it bad with 70 meters but they live in something like 30 meters and their apartment has no bathroom. They must walk to the public toilet five minutes away.)  The people in Beijing are stunningly impoverished. Well, the bulk of them. You see all these terrible looking apartments and hovels.

Even the Hutong seemed impoverished.  We met with an old Chinese man there (arranged by our guide) and got to see the inside of his home in the Hutong.  It was clean and tidy and very neat, but not what one would expect a retired scientist to be living in.  Actually, the man we met had, like so many Chinese, had a pretty rough life. He was a scientist working with archeologists before WWII as they excavated things like the Ming Tombs. But, after Mao took over, he was sent to a reeducation camp for years.  Eventually he was allowed out and went back to work. Now he is retired and living on the state pension. In China, everyone basically works for the state and when they retire they live on the state retirement pension. He was in better shape than many people, though, because he lives in this Hutong. The Chinese government is trying to preserve the Hutong and so they pay for the "renewal" of the Hutong homes. So, his home had been redone only the year before we visited it.

 

Inside the Hutong house with our Chinese host.  He makes a little extra money to supplement his income by hosting tourists like us and talking about his life.

 

A view of the Hutong neighborhood.  It was quite stark.

 

In the rickshaws.

So, I mentioned that people were appallingly poor in Beijing. That is true, but it was amazing to see the number of really expensive sports cars and luxury vehicles. There is a very wealthy class developing in China, but the trickle down effect is not taking place. The people at the top are exceedingly wealthy and the people at the bottom are appallingly poor. Our guides on the trip worked very hard. They were with us from early in the morning until late at night and I am sure that they made only a pittance. In general, they wore the same clothes every day (always looking neat and tidy, though).  They seemed very grateful for the small tips we gave at the end of our stay with them.  These rickshaw drivers hauled us around for half a day through the Hutong and in the end were paid about ten dollars apiece.

I also wanted to include some pictures of delicacies Graham and I saw while we were walking around one of the famous shopping areas in Beijing.  This area had tons of little shops and little eateries. I have to mention it was also one of the filthiest places I have been in my entire life. When we got back to the hotel I felt like I needed to scour myself.  At any rate, you will note some of the yummies here like starfish and seahorses on sticks.  

Some of the scorpions were still moving although they had been skewered.

We traveled from Beijing to Xian, home of Qin Shi-Huangti's tomb and the terra cotta warrior army.  In my World History class I also teach about Qin (he is also the one who originally pieced the various walls together into the Great Wall) so I really looked forward to seeing the tomb and warriors.

We arrived in the morning and began our journey toward the city--the airport is actually about an hour or so from the city.  The drive was interesting.  Xian is fueled by coal power and so along the way to the city we passed many coal plants.  Sam, with Fukushima still in mind, kept asking the guide if the coal plants were nuclear facilities and if they were about to melt down.  Seeing the coal plants was really fascinating for me. They evidently were not "clean coal" plants as they caused a hazy fog to hang over the entire region.  You could see the smut pouring out of the plants into the atmosphere.  I said I would never want to live near a coal plant because of all the pollution and Sam said, "but the sky will clear up when they aren't putting all that smoke out." He was stunned when I told him that they never stop putting it out and the sky is always hazy because of it.

When we finally reached Xian we had the same hotel trouble as before. We were put on a smoking floor in a smoking room with the ashtrays still full of ashes.  We complained, but the front desk just had two housekeepers bring up some sort of Lysol type stuff and spray the air vents.  It was really gross. So, Sid went down and said he wanted a no-smoking room. The front desk was not very cooperative and so Sid told our guide he was going to "punch Frank Li (the travel agent guy) in the nose" for not following up on our no-smoking request. Sherry took up the matter and we ended up with a lovely room on a no-smoking floor.  Maybe she was afraid of getting punched in the nose! :)

In Xian we visited a few sites.  In the end, the most fascinating thing about Xian, the little, sort of out of the way town where we expected to see less tourism stuff than in Beijing was just how much the city is built on tourism and how pre-packaged all of the attractions were.  Having said that, it is not necessarily designed for Western tourists. Unlike Beijing, we saw almost no non-Asian people in Xian.  Everyone was Chinese and aside from the ubiquitous Pizza Hut and Kentucky Fried Chicken, the restaurants were designed with Chinese people in mind.

Our first day we visited the old city wall. 

 

On top of the old city wall. People were riding bikes around it, but we did not. It was hot and we were tired.

 

I can't remember if this was at the city wall or not, but you can see our guide, Sherry, who was wonderful, trying to make Sam happier. He was hot, tired, and very grouchy.