杭州西湖

杭州西湖 - 40
Originally uploaded by jonketo.

The lotuses were blossoming at West Lake in Hangzhou, so Sandra and I took a day trip. It was well worth the two hour train ride.

西安 Great Mosque

西安 Great Mosque
Originally uploaded by jonketo.

New photos from Xi'an and the Three Rivers Gorge Dam! We wrote about our Xi'an trip below, but have not written about Yichang yet. Will do that soon. Hope you like the pics!

Arrived in Yichang

So we arrived in Yichang to an airport with one baggage carousel and a smelly bathroom. On the way to the city center there were many small shops still open with their pink lights on. I guess the local light bulb store ran out of regular lights .... yeah right. We must have counted at least thirty of them before we got to the hotel.

So we are spending about $45 U.S. per night, which is only slightly more expensive than the 300 RMB we payed while in Beijing, but instead we get a 5 star hotel in Yichang. No joke. You can really see the economic disparity between the two locations. Money goes a lot further here. Not to mention that just recently Beijing was ranked as the 12th most expensive city to live in around the world.

I recommend that anyone coming to see the Three Rivers Gorge Dam or wants to start a Yangzi River tour in Yichang come and stay in the Guobin Garden Hotel (国宾花园酒店). http://www.gbhyhotel.com/.

Time for bed. We need to wake up early to see the dam.

Xian part deux

So Sandra gave a great description of what we did in Xi'an. So I will just ask a couple questions that I have from my experiences in Xi'an.

First question. Why don't stores that sell cell phones also sell IP cards? It is not as if each store is independent of the cell phone service providers. Each store is branded with a certain provider, such as China Mobile or China Communications. Some stores even have service people for those providers, so why don't they have IP cards? Why do you have to go to the headquarters to get the IP cards? Even they don't have them either. They told us to go across the street into a small mall and they finally had some IP cards. The whole experience puzzled me.

Why does crossing the street in Xi'an (or anywhere in China for that matter) remind me of playing frogger? Enough said.

Why do you think that the Terra Cotta Warrior factory you go to on your tour is the only one in Xi'an? They can't possibly make all of the ones you see in the street markets, especially because there are only a few people in the 'factory' at once. Oh wait, they aren't. As you get closer and closer to the Terra Cotta warrior site they are even more of them, all next to each other.

Why do all the people working in the stalls tell you your Chinese is awesome every time you are buying anything. Oh yeah, I remember. I am a walking 钱包 (money bag = wallet). Bargaining has changed since the last time I have been here or I might just be having more bargaining experiences this time. They have been quite varied thus far. Sometimes you need to walk away and sometimes you don't, but every time I feel like I could have payed less even though I am still paying less than half of what they started at. Has this been slowly rising? Do the salespeople quadruple the price because they know you will pay less than half or even less? Sometimes I use the gauge of how quickly they agree or how happy they are when they agree to tell if I have been ripped off or not. No one has been angry at me yet, so maybe I should practice bargaining some more. How far did I walk before they told me to come back. Is far better or is close better? I wish I knew the answers to these questions.

So we went to a hotel restaurant to eat food while we were on our tour with CITS in Xi'an. Note, the tour is pretty decent, but you still go to some places that are not so interesting. If you privately hire a cab and pay for lunch and tickets to attractions you will pay the same price or more, but if you don't want to go to the tourist traps (hua qing pool) it might better. So anyways, the hotel was called Flourishing Hotel, but it didn't seem flourishing as the first and second floors were almost entirely devoted to selling jade, rugs, wall screens, terra cotta warriors and other 'tourist trash'. It didn't have a flourishing feeling to me.

I am writing this as we are waiting for our flight to Yichang. The Xi'an airport is pretty nice. I like it better than the Beijing airport. It is smaller, newer and there are less people. It might be the same as comparing Orange Country airport with Los Angeles international airport. When we were waiting for dinner Sandra and I walked around a little bit to see if we could find some gifts. We didn't, they were all overpriced. We stopped in one shop and started looking at the chess boards. The clerk approached and we started chatting and she asked us how to play international chess, so we explained as best we could. it is amazing how quickly vocabulary becomes specialized. After we explained the rules of international chess she kindly taught us how to play Chinese chess. There are some subtle differences that make us think it would be much harder to play Chinese chess. I would like to learn, so I can go back to Beijing and play with the old men who would play until the late hours of the night.

Loving how everyone looks at Sandra first while speaking. She responds, which I love ever more.

Our plane is boarding soon, gotta go.

Xian, the troublesome, the nice and the tour

Xian means "western peace" in chinese. To me, Xian means "a place of no International calling cards". Jon and I walked all over Dongdajie, Xian's longest and largest street and couldn't find a place to buy a IP (International calling card). There were plenty of cell phone places that had a sign indicating that they sold IP cards, but when we asked the sales associates, they said, oh, we don't have those. Jon and I finally found a place and bought a card. My parents were quite happy to hear from us. Though, now I'm worried that our search for a IP card in Yichang will be even more difficult. Ok, enough venting about the inconvenience of getting a IP card in Xian, time to talk about the interesting aspects.

We arrived in Xian quite early in the afternoon, so we decided to tour the city. We went to McDonald's for lunch because I was quite sick of Xian after the tiresome search for an IP card and useless sales associates. I missed the States so much...
After lunch, Jon and I went to the Muslim Quarter to take a look at the Great Mosque. The Great Mosque is really interesting because it had a very Chinese feel to it. The architecture is completely Chinese...Tang dynasty architecture with tile roofs and upturned eaves. We also did some souvenir shopping in the Muslim quarter.

Jon and I joined a CITS tour when we arrived in Xian. The tour took us to the Bingmayong (terra cotta warriors), Huaqing pool (winter palace), and the Big Goose Pagoda (famous for being the pagoda that Shen Zheng designed when he returned from India, Journey to the West). The tour bus also took us to a tourist trap where we were urged to purchase terra cotta warriors of the best quality (best quality = baked in a kiln). The Huaqing pool was built in 1950 in the place of where the ancient pools were located...I personally think that the Huaqing pool was built because you really can't spend a whole day just seeing the bingmayong and Xian needed more tourist attractions. The Big Goose Pagoda was very peaceful, except for some hammers pounding and 5 cranes that can be seen in the distance just behind the pagoda. The bingmayong is awesome and as such, the Xian government has successfully turned the site into a very tourisy place. Books, postcards, sculptures, and many other museum-like items. The varying facial features of the bingmayong leads one to wonder at the artistic abilities of the peoples of ancient China. They also must have had a lot of clay around to sculpt so many warriors and horses...quite amazing. Though, the movie that they showed in the movie theater (yes, there is a movie theater on the site) was more of a Qin dynasty movie showing some actor dressed as Qin Shi Huang. I would have liked to see a documentary on the discovery of the bingmayong since it is an historical site afterall.

Xian food is ok, nothing spectacular. We had some dumplings that were decent. Starbucks was also nowhere to be found. Being from Seattle, I'm a little bummed about not getting my coffee fix. I had to get coffee from McDonald's and let's just say that Xian doesn't really know how to make good coffee. I'll just have to wait a few more days before I get back into Seattle for some sweet, brewed goodness.