The Open Market

Despite our earlier urinary experiences in Inner Mongolia, we took an overnight train to Xi'An, this time in the upmarket "Soft Sleeper" class. The additional cost was more than worth it: our compartment was spacious and comfortable, containing a small table and four beds with crisp sheets. Even considering the weird noises that filtered from nearby compartments, this was easily the best sleeper train I've ever been in.

At noon we alighted in Xi'An, one of the ancient imperial capitals of old and eternal resting place of the famed terra-cotta army. We weren't going to see it until tomorrow though, so we had a tranquil afternoon ahead of us, to be spent finding a hotel and walking the city. Now, after ten days in the country, you might think that we had acquired a sizable vocabulary. Actually, all of us together knew only three Chinese words: Nihao ("hello"), Xie-xie ("thank you") and Tso-kai (roughly: "Get lost"). The latter was by far the one we used the most. I have visited many tourist traps, and seen many street vendors, some of them much poorer than the average Chinese, but nowhere have I found touts as annoyingly persistent as in China. Once a Chinese street vendor finds a Caucasian tourist, he'll follow and pester him until either he gets arrested by the police, the tourist starts screaming, or judgment day comes.

Coincidentally, one of the conductors left the train with us and told us he could get us a room for a good price. Since we didn't have any better plans, we agreed. This turned out to be a mistake. Cutting a long story short, after following him to a couple of grubby and overpriced business hotels, and telling him that we'd rather look for a room on our own, and walking through half the city with him trailing us, and asking him politely to leave us alone, then again slightly less politely, it ended with Rolando, Micol and I rounding on him in the middle of the street and literally yelling: "What the hell is your problem? What part of 'NO' don't you understand? We are not looking for a hotel right now, and even if we were, at this point we would not stay anywhere you’d recommend, out of principle. We really don't want to be rude but you need to stop following us. Now. Go away. Tso kai. Get Lost. What is it that I have to say to make you shut up and disappear?" By the time we'd finished our tirade there were about fifteen people looking amusedly at this man in uniform getting yelled at by three very irritated lao wais. We turned on our heels and started walking downtown. He still followed us at a distance for a while before giving up. A few streets down another guy accosted us: "New in Xi'An? Looking for a r..." – "NO!", Rolando and I barked simultaneously without even turning our heads, leaving him standing there. He was barely surprised.

We ended up staying in a chain hotel, where we managed to get a 20% discount on the alleged "lowest rate ever". This is common in China, but I'm usually so bad at haggling that getting even that pleased me very much. We dropped our bags and went out for a walk.

Xi'An looked instantly classier and more prosperous than Chengdu. Its old town is about 4km across and surrounded by a wall big enough to bike on, which is allegedly the only intact connecting city rampart remaining in the world. It looks as if it was built yesterday. The streets were lined with upscale shops and full of fancy cars, including those sporty BMWs you barely ever see in Europe. Then, a little beyond the drum and bell tower (a nondescript pagoda in the middle of a huge roundabout) the street changed into a vast open-air market.

Two millennia ago, Xi'An was the end of the Silk road, and it has been a market town from time immemorial. Some of this spirit is still alive today: vendors were selling everything, from head massagers to frog-like wooden instruments, along with every food imaginable – ground meat pancakes, random-animal-on-a-stick, fresh pomegranates, and bunches of black... things that could have been vegetal or animal, were seemingly made for eating, but mostly looked like a Giger concept sculpture.

I bought some durian, a spiky south-east asian fruit with a melon-apricot flavor, perhaps best-known as the template for the  otherworldly Singapore concert hall. I was extremely happy: the market had all the warmth and energy I had enjoyed so much in south-east asia and had not yet found in the middle kingdom. In this joyous state of mind, we walked back to the lounge in our hotel, did our very best to sample the entire cocktail menu in a single sitting, then went to sleep.