The train ride from Tianjin to Xi'an took 18 hours, but where that time spent on a plane is overwhelming and cramped, that time spent on the train in our plush sleeper car was lovely. We had the "soft sleeper" set up as a two level bunk bed, whereas the "hard sleeper" has a three-tiered bunk. Our beds were especially luxurious after the hard sleeping arrangements at the Tianjin hostel, I melted when I discovered that we each had two pillows. Two! The epitome of decadence. Somebody likened the train to being rocked gently/jerkily by a robot nanny. We spent a couple of hours playing word association with each other, my favorite segues were feminist--Frankenstein, bondage--cabbage and seduction--mousse (moose?)
The car next to ours had a food car. My freakin' train had a freakin' food car. What an awesome way to travel.
We slept through the night and didn't arrive in Xi'an until mid-day, so there was a lot of staring out the windows the next morning. The land we were passing through changed from flat farmland to hills of pale yellow earth. The guidebook said that it was loess, clay blown in on rough Siberian winds. Some of the hillsides had been terraced some time in the long past, because the terraces were overgrown with weeds and pioneer plants. Hell, those hillsides were probably being farmed hundreds of years ago.
The railroad tracks were lined with hollyhocks and Western-style headstones, which Bryan assured us are indeed grave markers.
We made it to the train station and managed to find the Xiangzimen hostel without any difficulty, even though the directions there were terribly zen (and by 'zen' I mean entirely unhelpful.) "Take the 603 bus 6 stops and get off at the nanmen exit. You will find our hostel in 3 minutes." I mean, the prediction ended up being right, but even so. The hostel was probably the prettiest one we stayed in, main building was 200+ years old and had a series of open courtyards. The main building with most of the bedrooms had rooftop access and balconies and heavy wooden furniture. It reminded me of a place that I had a good dream about years ago, and a marvelous atmosphere.
The common room/restaurant/where the wireless lives.
The upstairs hallways walls were crammed with messages from past guests. My favorites were definitely a bright green spider stencil, the comment about Karl's head and of course the strange anti-knitting graffiti.
As we passed from the main house (built during the Ming dynasty) into the main building where our rooms were we passed a dusty ginger and white cat curled up in a chair. The cat was almost perfectly still, and if it hadn't been breathing shallowly I would have sworn up and down that it was a moth-eaten stuffed cat. When I petted it Hostel Cat made absolutely no response, no purring thrum, no stretch and arch, nada. I guess when you get poked by foreigners all day you just kind of shrug it off and continue your nap.
By the time I had showered and cleaned up from long trip Bryan and Max had vanished, so Brennan and I went off in search of dinner. We found a place near the hostel called Cantonese delights and, since Canton was our next stop we felt we ought to get a preview of culinary pleasures. That and we were starving, and besides this restaurant the street looked like it was mostly banks and upscale clothing boutiques. We climbed a staircase up to the restaurant, which had a gleaming front lobby that resembled a hotel except for the bubbling water and tanks full of fish at the far end of the room. Most of the lights were off in the restaurant, but that was because we came in between lunch and dinner. We were taken to a table with chairs that had those button-up-the-back covers and given an epic menu, full of pictures. We took at least fifteen minutes to leaf through the menu, gazing at pictures of every kind of meat imaginable, chicken, pork, eel, jellyfish, fish, fish, fish, other fish, oxtail (which isn't actually beef tail, I don't think) and lots of liver (which comes form the Liver Animal, obviously.) It was just the two of us in the restaurant, besides the waitstaff. While our waitron stood guard over us a few feet away, the cooks peeked out at us, and the man who seemed to be the manager (from the way he kept fussing over other people's uniforms) kept an eye on us. In spite of the eeriness of being watched by an army, and eating in a "fancy" sit-down restaurant for the first time in China, the place was pretty surprisingly tranquil. And then good came and it was mightily delicious.
We ate porkbelly from a bed of what were basically collard greens, a savory tea gelatin with coconut milk, and amazingly slippery cold grey noodles from a spicy red broth that were equal parts tricky and delicious. I think it was while eating those noodles that I realized that my chopstick skills are perfectly adequate. If I can eat well-oiled noodles I can probably manager most things. We also shared tall bottles of Tsingtao over the meal. Chinese beer comes in liter bottles (or somewhere around that) and is drunk from smaller glasses. Like in other parts of Asia, in China pouring is an important aspect of the guest-host relationship, so in mock-homage we kept sneakily refilling each other's glasses.
When we got back to the hostel I did my laundry (with Chinese Tide!) and while it spun I went up on the roof. There were men on the roof next door, breaking roof tiles with hearty smacks from the flat of a shovel, it made a great breaking noise. The sun was too hot and merciless to stay on the roof for long, though, so I slipped back down to my room in the basement which, though windowless was perfect because it was cave-like. After my laundry we went for a long walk through the South Gate and further south towards the Wild Goose Pagoda. I saw a recommendation scribbled on the wall upstairs at the hostel for the fountain show in front of the pagoda. On the huge square around the pagoda we found people doing some kind of Chinese line dancing, or it may have possibly been Falun Gong practitioners. They moved in synchronicity, which was kind of eerie as a big square of 40 people all moving together.
The fountain show started, lights glowing through water in blues and greens and reds. Some people jumped into the fountain, running underneath the water plumes and whooping loud enough to be heard above the loud techno-classical accompaniment to the lights. We plotted coming back in our bathing suits so we could play in the fountain again.
We limped back to the hostel after only a half hour of the fountain show because Brennan had a a sinus headache. I brought him how water for tea and he curled up in his room to nap through the headache. I went up to the little outdoor courtyard and sat at the heavy stone table writing in my journal until Bryan and Max found me out there and invited me to the bar street. The bar street was conveniently located right behind our hostel, and was literally a street of just bars. In the first bar we found a fairly unremarkable band playing strange Chinese-jazz fusion, I say that the band was unremarkable but the saxophone player was marvelous as smokin' jazz or some pretty hot blues.
While Max and I drank beer (and he tried unsuccessfully to order a double vodka tonic) Bryan joined us in a comradely teetotaling fashion, drinking juice and getting just about as silly as us drinkers did. By the time we had enjoyed toasts at the last bar, which was overrun by the family owners who were celebrating somebody's birthday (and thus totally more sloshed than we were) Max was drunken-ravenous, he was pretty much, "A hotdog! My kingdom for a hotdog!" so we went off in search of food. It felt miraculous at the time, because I was giddy and drunk, but we stumbled (literally) into an outdoor 3am Chinese food court, set up in front of a bunch of posh banks and shops. We ate fried rice and gobbled it while sitting in what felt like child-sized stools at a child-sized table. This might be the drunk talking, but it was amazingly delicious.
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