no sleep 'til beijing (part 1)

As I noted at the end of my previous entry, since last Tuesday night Maya and I (joined by Eveline and Fish) have been on a rather sleepless mini-voyage to Xi'an (home of the Terracotta Warriors) and Pingyao (the best preserved ancient Chinese city in the whole country), and extended internet access has been hard to come by which is why I haven't posted anything new for the past week. Now Maya and I are back in Beijing, staying at a fancy-ass Marriott Courtyard hotel (we return to the budget lodgings of the 7 Days Inn tomorrow), trying to recuperate from said mini-voyage, and there's a nice little "Business Center," where, for the excessive fee of 30 yuan per half hour (approx. $5) I can type away happily.

Before I get into our Xi'an/Pingyao adventures and misadventures, first a quick plug: I've got my first cover story (on Phil Anselmo and his band Down) in the new issue of Revolver. If you have a chance, check it out - and make sure and check out the Editor's Letter, as well.

Now the good, the bad, and the ugly of our trip to Xi'an and Pingyao:

Good: Unloading about 1/3 of our shit out of our backbreakingly heavy backpacks and dropping it off at Eveline's place Tuesday afternoon so we wouldn't have to lug it all around with us through Xi'an and Pingyao. Eveline's freelance writer roommate, Jen, let us in while Eveline was at work.

Bad: The drug raid incident that went down on our second day in China, which Jen wrote this article about while we were away.

Good (or at least better than we expected): The 11-hour "hard sleeper" overnight train ride from Beijing to Xi'an. First, a few words of explanation for all of you 1st-worlders who don't have to experience such things: The way you get from Beijing to Xi'an (assuming you don't want to shell out for the plane flight, which is what Fish, being a wealthy fucker, likely would have done, if it had not been for us) is to take an "express" (see 11-hour) overnight train. Said trains are divided into a number of different sections, each being more or less expensive and correspondingly more or less uncomfortable. There're the soft seats (padded benches where you sit for 11 hours) and hard seats (wooden or metal benches where you try to do the same - and, if you're a dude, likely blow your prostate up to basketball proportions in the process); then there are the soft sleepers (a cabin fitting four people via two bunk beds) and the hard sleepers (a whole bunch of stacked bunk beds where the proletariat masses get to snore and fart together through the night). When, a few weeks ago, Maya and I were talking to Eveline about going to Xi'an, she had volunteered to take care of the travel arrangements, and since Fish also really wanted to see the Terracotta Warriors, we asked her to include him in our plans. Since we now had 4 people total, we assumed, not unreasonably, I think, that she would opt for a soft sleeper cabin. But as they say, when you assume, you make and ass out of U and me, and yeah, Eveline emailed us back a few days before we were set to arrive in China to say that she had bought 4 hard sleeper tickets from Beijing to Xi'an. Maya was nervous, to say the least - when she was growing up in the Ukraine, she had ridden on similar overnight trains with her family, but as far as she could remember, never in the hard sleeper section. When she called her mom to confirm this, her mom responded, "Of course not. I would never do that to you." Now Maya was super-psyched. As for why our so-called friend Eveline had booked these hard sleepers, she explained that they were the hardest tickets to get (pun intended) since most Chinese don't want to shell out for a soft sleeper and can't afford a plane ticket, and that she had ridden that way before and loved the experience "because," as she told us via email, "you get to hang with the common folk this way... often times have random conversations (which will no doubt involve everyone asking me, 'Where are your friends from? How come your English is so good? Which do you like better, China or America?') Plus train culture is such an interesting experience. Like before they turn off the lights for bed, everyone sits in the aisles chowing down on the TONS of food they brought with them, as if they've been hording food all month specifically for the purpose of getting to pig out on the train ride." This was sounding better and better. But actually the ride wasn't bad at all - the train was clean, relatively smooth, and no Chinese common folk really bothered us (perhaps to Eveline's disappointment), though they did stare at us a lot as we were just about the only whities on the train; the bunks were not jumbled in a big open space, dorm-room-style, but rather in soft-sleeper-style cabins - the only difference was that they were stacked 6 to a cabin rather than 4. While this did make the bunks rather claustropobically coffin-like, the matresses were actually softer, I think, than those in most of the Asian hotels we've stayed at so far. Plus the plushy comforters were to die for. I didn't get a much sleep, since I couldn't shift around or spread out at all, plus I had a bag full of our few valuables (passports, iPods, camera, that's about it) under my pillow. But Maya remembered that as a kid, she had always wanted to ride in the top bunk, and that's just where we got to ride to Xi'an - so in some ways, you could even say that the ride was a dream come true. Here's Maya enjoying her top bunk (while an old Chinese dude stares vacantly at what kind of looks like a laptop in the photo but was actually a metal plate for garbage).

Depressing (and a little odd): the view from the Beijing-to-Xi'an train. Crumbling ancient-looking shanty towns, filthy coal mines, filthy factories pumping black smoke into the already smog-filled skies, new-ish-looking building prematurely reduced to rubble though people apparently still live and work in them, lonely gravestones along the train tracks, and, uh, miles of corn fields! (Corn, according to Eveline, is "huge" in China, and yeah, over the course of our trip, we'll see lots of locals chomping down on corn-on-the-cob. Who knew? And in a grocery store, we'll see corn-flavored yogurt! Yum.)

Good: Crashing at Fish's fancy-as-fuck luxury hotel in Xi'an and blowing off our own hotel reservation. Though his place was just outside the city walls, and our place was in the city center, central Xi'an turned out to basically be a big fucking mall...in what we decided was essentially the Iowa of China.

Not so good but funny: Discovering that Eveline, who we were all kind of relying on to order food and get us to the right places, etc., only speaks and understands just enough Chinese to get by and is basically illiterate. Half the time she would have a long exchange with a local, a hotel staff member, a waiter and waitress, and then we would all be like, "So what did they say?" and she'd smile, shrug, and answer, "Oh, I don't know. All I got was something about spinach." As she herself admits, she really only understands about 40 to 50% of what's going on, but since that's 30 to 40% more than we understand, we're still very, very thankful to have her.

Underwhelming: the Terracotta Warriors. First of all, you really can only observe them from fairly far away (Maya, for some reason, actually thought that we might be able to walk among them; I didn't expect that, but was still hoping we'd be a little closer). Secondly, the Warrriors are divided among 3 pits, and only Pit 1 really has a good number of the clay dudes standing together in formation (in a bizarrely stripped-down hangar-like building). A shocking amount of the site has yet to be excavated or restored, which meant that Pits 2 and 3 were mostly just piles of dirt which some holes dug into them. Here I am, underwhelmed.



Overwhelming: The apocalyptic weather in Xi'an. Due to otherwordly smog levels, the sky over the city looked a crazy yellow and visibility was something looking through wonton soup; Fish's already hacking cough (which had been steadily worsening since he arrived in Shanghai a week-and-a-half ago) got to the point where you almost expected him to cough up blood (which wouldn't have been far from local custom: Chinese regularly hack up and spit out phlegm on the streets - it's not considered impolite or anything - due to the pollution levels in the country). By the afternoon of our first day there, it started to rain, though our cab driver (more on him in a bit) explained that it usually never rains. The bartendress at Fish's hotel said that the increasing pollution has been making the weather all crazy, and she predicted even worse rain our second day there; we were all skeptical of her meteorological prowess, but good for her, and bad for us, her prediction proved all too accurate, and it pissed (probably, acid) rain all over us all day.

Good: hiring a cab driver for the day for around 400 yuan (approx. $55); the dude even waited around for us for hours while we explored various sites at no extra charge.

Disconcerting and strange: As Eveline pointed out to us, the Chinese word for
Um" sounds exactly like "niggah," which, as we quickly found out as she and our cab driver talked, means that listening in on the average Chinese conversation can be a peculiar and uncomfortable experience - if you're sensitive to racial slurs (which Maya, the kike, and me, the half chink, are not, so we found it pretty fucking funny). I joked with Maya that this would probably be the only Chinese world she would come away from our trip remembering.

Creepy as hell: the tomb of some emperor and empress (for some reason we absolutely cannot find their names anywhere right now) that were filled with thousands of doll-sized recreations of soldiers, musicians, enuchs, concubines (mostly armless, since their arms were made of wood and had rotted away), and all kinds of farm animals. Eveline had joked at the Terracotta Warriors site that it was strange that no one had made a horror movie there yet, but as soon as we walked into this site (whatever the hell it was called), we realized that this was the place for a horror flick. Dolls are just scary.



Very cool: Xi'an's Muslim quarter. Bustling alleys full of vendors hawking everything from Mao lighters and knockoff Obituary T-shirts(?!) to elaborate paper cut-outs and exotic streetfood - and doing so, amazingly, without harassing us, grabbing us, shouting at us, etc. like we've experienced basically everywhere else in China. Many of the locals - mostly Chinese Muslims - barely looked Asian, in their white hats and with their curly hair and light-colored eyes. We walked through the gorgeous Great Mosque, which, in contrast with the people, looked very Asian and barely looked like any Mosque we'd ever seen, displaying as it did almost no Middle-Eastern influence, other than some weird, ornate Arabic-in-Chinese-font script. The night of our second (and final) day in Xi'an we ate at this crazy and rather sketchy-looking restaurant in the quarter, where all the food was grilled up outside on the wet, rain-splattered streets and brought into us at our table. The wait staff was all rough-and-tumble prepubescent boys and girls in blue shirts and white pants, except our waiter who had no uniform, a gimp leg, and spoke a Northern dialect that Eveline couldn't understand, which made ordering particularly fun. We drank beer and ate delicous spicy fish, some noodles, crispy flatbread, and over 50 skewers of lamb and some mystery cow meat that we theorized later was probably the most savory of the cow's 4 stomachs. Fish was particularly happy to be gorging so much animal flesh, while Maya was nervous that her own (presumably not-so-savory) stomach would not be able to handle all the street meat through that night's imminent 9-hour hard-sleeper ride to Pingyao. Fish would not be accompanying us there, as he had one more day scheduled in "beautiful" Xi'an before flying home to NYC. Having sampled most of the city's so-called wonders, enjoyed its gorgeous weather, and inhaled its aromatic smog, we were particularly sorry to leave him behind - but at least, we knew that he would be able to find plenty of meat-on-a-stick. (To be continued)