Our driver was nowhere to be found after we finished visiting Terracotta Warriors so we went to have lunch at one of the restaurants right outside. Dad got to have his daily beer. Beers in China were really weak and tasted like shandy for some reason. Even Mum and I could drink them.
Cheers!!
Xi'an is famous for one of the four greatest jade in China - 藍田玉 Blue Garden Jade. Notice how everything or place is always one of the XX greatest in China? Haha. My purchase for the day - a jade bracelet that may or may not have been too expensive and may or may not be real heheh. It had a retail price of RMB900++ and Mum said RMB300... finally they agreed after pretending to hesitate and say it was too low. Our driver took us to another place at the end of the day and i saw a similar albeit uglier one (i think so anyway) and the salesperson said RMB100! Celaka.
Food was very expensive and gross. Every dish was sooooooo salty.
Xi'an speacialty apparently - tasted like canned corned beef. It looked and tasted dodgy.
Finally our driver came back and we walked to his car which was parked the furthest away as well. tsk tsk tsk... we had to walk past rows of new houses. Apparently the area used to be a dirt poor village. The government built all these houses and gave them to the villagers for free in return for turning the area into a gigantic tourist golden goose. They also get bonuses allegedly. Between 50,000 to 70,000 people visit the place DAILY. Multiply that by RMB150 each and the mind boggles.
Market at the side of the road.
Heaps of new apartments were being built in Xi'an.
Spotted a funny car with only three wheels.
Our very young driver for the day who chain smoked... most people chain smoked in China... twas very unattractive. He was telling the parents (who can strike up conversations with a rock) that it is very expensive to get married in Xi'an. Every girl expects a car and a house before agreeing to marry a guy. Poor dude.
Electricians and plumbers congregated underneath a flyover, waiting for business. This is the opposite in NZ where we have to BEG and pay an arm and a leg for tukang to come over and fix stuff.
Because we are the Hiis and do everything fast - especially eating, we had quite a bit of time left for the day. So the driver recommended that we go check out the Banpo Museum. We pooh poohed it when he first suggested it in the morning but since we had no where else to go, we capitulated. It was actually quite interesting.
半坡博物馆 Banpo Museum houses artifacts from the archaeological site of Banpo. The museum provides access to the excavated buildings, has a collection of artifacts from the site, and also has several reconstructed houses designed to resemble the Neolithic settlement from 6000 years ago.
Heaps of pottery were excavated.
The pottery had mysterious symbols etched on them..
Owl jar....
List of all the surnames...
Before there were chinese characters, people used to draw what they were trying to convey. This then slowly evolved into the characters we see today. This is what the picture for the surname TING used to look like.
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Hii looked like a roast duck which should really be Jayden's surname haha..
Liao looks like a bird too.
Jayden's Wong was the funniest.
Once you find the number of your surname, you can then go and find the statue to go with it. Not sure what it is meant to signify though.
Next up, Banpo settlement excavation sites.
There wasn't much to see in terms of buildings as they used wood to make their houses. But we could still see the foundation and holes made for the posts.
They also found grave sites for the dead.
No idea if this is real or not. It may be fake because it was just lying out in the open.
Remains of a round hut.
Square hut.
A video showed the reconstruction of what they think it looked like.
There was also an area with heaps of glass cabinets. Within these glass cabinets laid a lot of skeletons they found. I would think that these are real. Macabre huh? Pots were also buried with the dead which was very common.
Two group tombs were found in total - this contained 4 young women.
This had two men.
This was a bit different as it was found lying on its side.
This was probably a slave or servant because the body was just crumpled instead of being laid out properly.
This was the grave of the youngest girl found on this site. The square area in the background with the name plaque was the grave area.
No museum is complete without waxwork figures. Banpo people were basically like cavemen I guess.
Quite scarily lifelike... i expected one to move and say "Gotcha!!!!!".
My sporting dad.
Studies deduce that Banpo ancestors are from the Mongolian race, In terms of height, intelligence and appearance, they bear little difference to the modern man. Such chu chu features - Ah Here probably was a direct descendant hehehe. Due to poor living conditions, their longevity was only around 40 years old.
Models of the huts.
Bone needles!
axe
Stone cutters
Ridiculously tiny fish hooks
That night, we went to dinner theater show about Tang Dynasty. I got to take a photo with the very beautiful waitresses...... bahahahaha.
Theater which ended up being packed. Suckers.
This was already there when we got to our table. We told them to take it away as who knew how long it had been sitting there.
It was a 餃子宴 Dumplings Banquest. It was alright but got a bit sickening towards the end. We got there at 6 and finished eating by about 6.15. The waitress asked us if we were very hungry bahahah.
Two trays of dumplings....
.... as well as a plate of 水餃
The show started at 8!!! We were very very bored after waiting for such a long time. The show finally started with these two ladies playing elevator music bahahaha.
Then the dancing started... there were quite a number of dances and they all had different meanings and danced at different times and different occasions. To be honest, they all looked the same after a while.
This was some dance about the Imperial Court I think. These are the ladies-in-waiting.
the soldiers...
... the slutty Consort
... and finally the Emperor.
The mating dance...
And they lived happily ever after.... until she grew older and lost her looks and was then replaced. Cynical? Who, me????
Soldier dance.... very man.
This dancer was the star of a number of dances and she had the same hell po (slutty) expression throughout all of them. She was very bendy though.
Dance involving swordplay.
Not sure why this was part of the Tang culture because it screamed Thai to me.
Last day in Xi'an and we went to see the ancient city wall which acted as a fortress.
Weapons used to deter enemies....
It was a huge wall actually and there were electrical carts and bicycles for hire. But because it was May 1st, ie national labour day, there were heaps of people wanting to hire bicycles. I wanted to buy tickets for the electrical cart but there was only one queue so I had to queue with all the stupid bicycle hirers. It took forever to get to the front of the line because bicycle hirers had to sign contracts and pay a deposit. We couldn't just jump in a cart and pay the driver as tickets needed to be bought first. That was fine, but when I got to the front, the stupid idiotic useless rude worthless lump of clay told me that all the carts were fully occupied so I had to wait and refused to sell me tickets! But a nearly empty cart just drove past and they were in a shed so how would they know when the cart has occupancy? Needless to say I left in a huff.
It was an overcast day so we decided to walk to the next corner, which took 30 minutes, instead of doing a full lap.
Areas surrounding the walls...
Crappy old apartment buildings...
Finally, we spotted an exit to leave the stupid place. Yay.
It was really busy and hard to flag down a taxi so we jumped in a 三輪車 tricycle to get to a nearby mall. It was a two person one so we were a bit squashed. I spotted four person ones after that. They are like tuk tuks from Thailand.
Lunch was KFC. Dessert was portugese tart which was a bit too sweet and sickening.
May 1st so the mall areas were all packed with people - people mountain people sea. We decided to escape back to the hotel for a rest.
Some wedding convention was happening near our hotel.... obviously not that expensive to get a girl to marry then?
Decided to get soft serves from a stall (not McDonalds!!) I got a bit adventurous and bought food from stalls actually. No lau sai so all good. Strawberry for dad and Taro for me.
Mum got chocolate..... spot the fuzzy lovebirds in identical tee shirts next to Dad? What is wrong with these people, seriously?
Mum insisted that we go check out some famous pagoda that night so we took a public bus (RMB1 each!!!) and got to the place safely after being squashed like sardines for 15 minutes or so. Obligatory souvenir shops circled the area.
The "famous" pagoda.... not sure what for. Who cared, really?
We went hunting for dinner and came across our old favourite breakfast joint - Yon He Soya Milk. Bahahaha Mum got so sick of it.
We couldn't find the bus that we took to get there so we just jumped on the next bus which was less packed as it was a premium bus (RMB2 each). The idea was to jump off when we got to a shopping area and then take a taxi home after dinner. We ended up at a super popular steamboat place. It was on the 4th floor of a very dodgy and dirty set of stairs so Dad and I were a bit dubious. Mum insisted so we went with it.
The place was ridiculously busy and was open 24 hours a day! Who would want steamboat at 6 am in the morning I wonder? Check out the long long waiting list of people wanting a table.
This was a small part of the waiting area and the restaurant had board games that they could play while waiting and free snacks to munch on. Also check out the huge selection of red wine on offer. Steady!
On top of all that, waiting customers could also get their shoes polished for free!!!!!!!! What the.
We got a table super fast for some reason. Mum said it was because she sweet talked the waitresses and told them we were tourists from Malaysia. heheh... the service was the best we had in China and the food was good and inexpensive. I can see why they were so popular.
Fooooooooooooooooooooood. These were half serves by the way. The waitress advised us to get half serves so that we could have more variety. Huge servings.
We took tuk tuk home again and Mum was tiiiiired.
Next up, Nanjing.
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