On Chinese trains you hand your ticket over when you board and they give you a card which they then swap once you are approaching your station. I don’t know what the point is, I guess at worse it keeps employment levels high and means that it is difficult to miss your stop. After I had my ticket returned to me shortly before arriving in Xian, I smoked a cigarette by the door of the train, wondering why the door wasn’t opening and nobody else was getting off. After about 10 minutes I went back into the carriage and realised people were boarding from the opposite end of the carriage. I rushed up to my bunk and grabbed my stuff. I felt something was not quite right as I walked off the train but wasn’t quite sure what it was. Xi’an was noticeably chilly in comparison to my last ports of call. I was still wearing shorts and was asked several times “ni leng bu leng”? Are you cold or not cold? I proudly replied ‘Bu leng’ but if I am to be 100% honest with myself, I was maybe a wee bit. I had a noodle soup then wandered through the old city walls to find somewhere to stay. During the ¾ of an hour or so in between getting off the train and having my soup I continued to feel something was wrong. Anyway Xi’an’s streets are very similar to Beijing. It has similar wide avenues, with wide pedestrian streets running on a north-south axis. The architecture also feels very Beijingish: modern but not particularly tall with no landmarks on the skyline, a lot of 1980’s communist buildings with limited success in their attempts to make them befit their Imperial historical location and most importantly of all, smog, lots of smog. I passed a group of Hui people (a Muslim minority spread across much of China). They were chatting amongst each other with lots of sheep around them on the pavement outside a mosque. I then reached a square. On one side was a huge government building that looked bland, authoritative and imposing. Around the square were lots of hastily erected glass buildings with many advertisements for consumer goods. There was one very old building tucked away in a corner, deteriorating and almost un-noticeable with a construction crane behind it. In the centre of the square was a park where there were several dancing groups and tai-chi practitioners all moving to music that seemed in conflict with one another surrounded by busy loud, traffic. The smog gave the whole area an aura of uncertainty about what lay beyond the horizon and I thought to myself, this scene symbolises my impressions of modern china perfectly. It was then that I realised what was not right. I’m back to losing a camera a month although the rate at which I’m losing glasses continues to decline.
I got to a hostel and had a coffee with a lively and very friendly Scottish couple (Aaron and Susan) then on the advice of the staff, headed back to the train station to try and get help. The sheep were getting skinned on the pavement as I walked back. Blood was flowing into the gutters in amongst the passers-by (who didn’t seem at all perplexed) and the clearly disturbed sheep that hadn’t yet been slaughtered who were just metres away from their deceased comrades. The policeman outside the station wanted nothing to do with me, he walked away from me on several occasions and even though I couldn’t understand him I got what he meant - not my problem, stop pestering me as I take my daily stroll with my chest out. It felt good to swear at a policeman and not get arrested. I used my old ticket to get back into the station and found the police in the station far more helpful. Smoking in a police station and stubbing it out on the floor without getting arrested feels almost as good as calling a muscular but lazy policeman a fat lazy c$%t. Brilliant. The helpful policemen located where the train was going to – a 40 hour journey to Lhasa in Tibet. I had managed to explain my situation to the policeman reasonably clearly in Chinese but struggled to understand what he was saying much of the time. I showed them my ticket with the carriage and seat number. They checked on the train and found nothing on the seat I’d been on. He continued to speak in Chinese for a considerable amount of time before eventually speaking in broken but easily understandable English. All this time he had wanted to know if I was sure my camera had definitely been left on the train and not been stolen. The Chinese are so embarrassed about making mistakes and therefore losing face that they are prepared to waste hours of their time avoiding using grammatically imperfect English rather than do what is practical when I blatantly didn’t understand what he was saying in Chinese. This absolute fear of failure seems ingrained deeply in their cultural psyche and seems to be a cause for their unwillingness to think outside the box. As its economy is mainly based on manufacturing goods it is not a huge problem at the moment but China is building all these grand central business districts with the assumption that they are soon going to be leaders of the global economy. The most dynamic companies in the world such as Google, IBM and Apple thrive on people shamelessly contributing ideas no matter how ridiculous they may be and eventually picking up on a good one. I feel China will struggle to advance from a manufacturing economy to a global economic leader unless its people are educated in a way that promotes creativity in a way in which being wrong is seen as part of the process in attaining an outcome that is original and logistically feasible.
Despite having lost another camera I left the police station quite satisfied that I had ignored the advice of the first policeman who advised me to forget about it, got passed the security of the people who were supposed to only let in people with valid outbound tickets and confirmed one way or another whether my camera was lost or not. I left them the phone number of the hostel I was staying in just in case it magically reappeared.
The sheep had all gone but the pavement was still covered in blood as I made my way back. I bought the same model of camera as my last two and got a 200 kuai discount without even trying to bargain and went for a wander around the city. My one in Beijing was 400kuai more expensive. I ended up doing no sight-seeing. I’m bored of drum towers, city walls, bell towers and pagodas and quite happily sat on a bench trying to get lucky with the young ladies who wanted their photo taken with a wild and hairy foreigner. There were a group of 3 guys sitting next to me who got really excited when they overheard me tell a particularly hot one that I was from ‘Sugelan’, the land of Alex Ferguson and were eager for conversation. I had the most in depth conversation I’ve had with Chinese people since I arrived in August. We chatted about the potential problems facing India in the future with their uncontrolled spiralling birth rates, the geography of China and my impressions of the places I’ve been to and a lot of football chat. I’ve discovered that regardless of the culture, Cristiano Ronaldo is universally considered a vain, self-absorbed, poncy git. I’ve also discovered that in Chinese, the snooker player John Higgins is known as Shee Gee Nuz (or something like that) and Brazilian women who can dance the samba are globally considered as being ultra-sexy. We chatted for well over an hour. The three guys insisted on taking me for a meal and we washed down a bottle of rice wine (56% alcohol). After this I had a 5 minute stroll through the Muslim quarter and other than that saw nothing. I still felt it was a good productive day and it was much more fun having banter than seeing the sights that the city has to offer. I returned to the hostel feeling all jolly (the rice wine had nothing to do with it) and discovered that my camera had been found, exactly in the location where I said it would be. Never mind.
The following day I found a bookshop that had an English section and bought a biography of Genghis Khan, The adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain and a Chinese classic, The Three Kingdoms. I then went to see Bing Ma Yong (The Army of Terracotta Warriors). I wasn’t disappointed with the Terracotta warriors primarily because I knew it wouldn’t be overly awe inspiring. The museum putting the artefacts into their historical context was more interesting than the actual army. There are approximately 2000 of the 7000 soldiers on display. Every soldier is unique and after an extensive search I can conclude that not one of them has a better afro than me. That was enough to make my day. My preconceived ideas about Xi’an were 100% correct. I knew that its illustrious history was only visible in miniscule quantities. It’s an ok place to visit if you’ve got time on your hands. I can understand why people feel disappointed in Xi’an. That’s what they get for feeling obliged to put it on their essential to do in China lists. You’ll get a much better sense of Chinas past by going into the rural lands than seeing a bunch of stone men standing in a row, especially, if you’ve travelled for two days or so just to see them.
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