China Update – Day 2 Xi’an – Yesterday:
First the food:
Breakfast was Cappuccino and milk biscuits. Yum.
There is a little restaurant across the street from our
hostel (the HanTang Hostel – you can see it for yourself online) that serves a
delicious noodle dish of spinach noodles, cucumbers in vinegar and cilantro,
and sautéed mixed veggies. It is loaded with garlic and was perfect for lunch.
For dinner, we ate at a Szechuan restaurant: Kung Pao
Chicken, Sweet and Sour Egg Plant, Orange Peel Pork, Mushrooms and Bock Choy,
Tofu noodles. Szechuan tastes like the Chinese food we are familiar with. When
eating, we eat “family style,” which means the dishes are brought out
one-by-one (the table can start eating once the third dish is placed) and put
on a large lazy-Susan in the middle of a round table. Everyone has a small
plate and chopsticks in front of them, so we rotate the lazy-Susan and use our
own chopsticks to pull food off the dishes as they spin by. It is a fun way to
eat, and breaks down all food barriers, because, essentially, we are all eating
off the same plate. We usually eat family style and our team loves eating this
way.
About the activities:
Lishan and I let the group sleep in and have a lazy waking-up. We have
been going-going-going, and this hostel has a ton of wonderful places to land,
both as individuals and as groups, so we decided it would be nice to get rested
and reconnected yesterday. This is the first place where unstructured group
togetherness has been possible. There is a beautiful roof-top garden on the fourth-floor
that offers a small green oasis within a brick and cement landscape that is a
Chinese city. The HanTang is situated within an older, established
neighborhood. We tried to meet at 10:30 AM up in the peaceful, and warm, morning air, but
our plans were thwarted by the persistent pneumatic jackhammer rehabilitating
(tearing apart) one of the apartment complexes next door. So, we moved into the
unheated sauna just off the garden and finished morning debriefing there.
Then, we met Alex, an architecture student at one of the
local universities (he plans to study in Minnesota in the fall) who took us on
a 1.5 hour bus ride to see the Terracotta Warriors. Look it up on Wikipedia – it does a good job
of explaining what we saw. The students were blown-away and thoroughly loved
the history. I was so glad they were enthusiastic. So was I.
We planned on getting back to the city of Xi’an in time for
English Corner at 7 PM. But, China did not cooperate – TRAFFIC is horrendously
SLOW. We felt and still feel awful we let Xi’an down. But we learned a valuable
lesson: don’t do two things in one day when there is a set schedule. So, we
walked to our hostel, having dinner along the way.
That evening, we met up on the rooftop for a time of
togetherness which included Nick playing a broken guitar and singing us Flight of
the Concord songs, playing ping pong, and chatting about the day. We decided we
liked the opportunity to be together like this and commented on how the other
accommodations didn’t provide this opportunity.
Today, we are splitting up and exploring the Muslim Quarter,
the Bell Tower, do some antique shopping and walking or biking the ancient city
walls. It is supposed to get up to 90 degrees today, so we will be
drinking lots of water and taking it
easy.
On Sunday, tomorrow, we will visit a bible study with only
foreigners (Chinese nationals cannot join us) and then English Corner. Then,
night train to Beijing.
Getting closer to actually seeing you all!
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