Xian Day 2!

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Hello everybody!

Weather here is not so good, but we’re carrying on undeterred. Xian is a beautiful city, I like it better than Beijing, although I think I’ve given Beijing a much better chance to grate on my nerves, I’m sure that if I stayed here for a long time I’d find things to complain about - in fact, if I was here for a week in this weather I’d probably leave it as soon as I could - but there’s awesome stuff here.

I’m just trying to think of what I did today - I’m actually writing this days later in a completely different city, trying to make it sound like I’m writing it on the same evening, so sorry to shatter the illusion, but I thought it would make the in incohesiveness of it all make a bit more sense if I explained that point.

Anyway back to the actual blog.

Today we went to the Bell tower of Xi’an - yesterday we went to the drum tower - so we thought we’d do the whole circuit. The drum tower has a better show that we went to today, but it’s still cool. They’ve got a few different instruments to play as well - the drum tower was just drums but they had a few traditional instruments playing along with the discordant bells. The rest is an exhibition of all the different bells that have been used throughout history. Oh the fun we had there. The things I learned. Priceless information. To be drawn away from that is like taking a child from his mother, like snatching a beer away from Garrett. Like snatching a bowl of M&Ms away from Brooklin. Like snatching a gadget away from Dad, or a quilt from Mum. And so it goes on, I’m sure you get the picture. I was clearly devastated at the thought of perhaps not entirely rounding out my understanding of bells throughout history. But alas, the time had to come, I had to cut my education short. It was time to go elsewhere.

That ‘elsewhere’ happened to be the Wild Goose Pagoda. This is a site particularly close to my heart because…

BORN FROM AN EGG ON A MOUNTAIN TOP
THE FUNKIEST MONKEY TO EVER POP.

Yes, that’s right, the Wild Goose Pagoda is the place where Monkey Magic was supposed to return the tablets of knowledge from India…well, Tripitaka was the monk, so technically he was supposed to bring them back, but Monkey was the coolest, followed by Pigsy, then Sandy, then Horse, and then Tripitaka.

So the story is that Tripitaka set out on a quest to find the wisdom of Buddha from India and bring it back to China. As it turns out, eating his flesh (he was a man, he was just played by a woman in the show) leads to immortality, so all sorts of nasties were chasing after him to gobble him up. So he was given some helpers who would be forgiven of the things they did wrong if they assisted. Pigsy was cursed because he hit on the daughter of one of the gods, Sandy was in trouble for breaking a valuable vase (I think) in heaven, and Monkey had been imprisoned under a mountain for 500 years by Buddha for eating all the peaches of immortality in heaven, after he, although being a mortal, had attained enlightenment through his own study. This is obviously a true story.

The actual story is called Journey to the West, and is compulsory reading along with 3 other books for all Chinese school kids. So when Tripitaka eventually got the writings, he came back to Xi’an, which was the capital at the time, and had the Wild Goose Pagoda built so that he could preserve them.

It’s a nice story. Unfortunately the only true bit of it all is that there was a monk that traveled to India and came back to Xi’an to store the writings he found. But I’m not one to ruin a good story with the truth. If you’re wondering about the name, there was a sign out the front that said that the name came from a Confucian proverb: “Over a buried wild goose, the pagoda is built”. I’m not joking, that’s the explanation for the name. I’m convinced that, when they don’t know why something is named something, they just make up a new Confuscian proverb.

Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself. We were lucky enough to get there right on time to see one of those dancing fountain things. If you’ve ever seen the dancing fountains at the Crown Casino in Melbourne, multiply that by 5,000 and you’d come close to what these fountains were like, they were just phenomenal. They were alternating Chinese and Western classical music, and the fountains stretched from in front of the pagoda down to the street, which would have easily been 500m away. One of the fountains at the street end would have shot water at least 40m in the air. It was completely awesome! We stayed and watched that for a while, we figured that since it was raining anyway we might as well get wet by some fountains too!

We went from there and climbed the pagoda. If you ever come to Xi’an, I’d base my decision on whether to climb the pagoda on the weather. If it’s a cloudy overcast day, don’t bother, all you’re going to see is lots of cloud, and you’re going to be angry at climbing seven stories of stairs for that. If it’s a clear day, it’s probably worth it, although there’s nothing in there to get interested in (unless you’re a Buddhist Scholar I guess - I’m not). From there , we checked out a few little markets around about and then got an awesome pizza before catching the bus home.

We had planned on riding a bike around the city walls, but you’re not allowed to when it’s raining because it’s dangerous. So we thought we’d walk around it, but found it was actually relatively expensive, and it was still raining, and Sue had wet socks and my feet hurt, so we just had dinner and stuffed around for a while until we could catch our train to Pingyao. I’m looking forward to Pingyao, it’s gonna be great, I’ve been looking forward to it since we first thought of going to China, so yeah, I’m excited.

That’s all, I’m off, hope everybody’s well. I doubt I’ll be able to upload any of this until we get back to Beijing, but anyway, send me messages!!!

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