Saturday 18th July 2009 train to Xi’an

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Saturday 18th July 2009 train to Xi’an
5.45am alarm roused us from a pretty decent nights sleep and we made our way down to the train station with an Australian girl we met in the reception area. We didn’t need to be there so early in the end and it was 7am before the train pulled in and we got on. Turned out that the seats/beds we had been given were in two different carriages, and amazingly the Australian had a bed 2 away from one of our ticket and she kindly swapped it. Even though it is a day time train I think it was coming all the way from Guangzhou so it was all sleepers, we had hard sleeper tickets in which the cabin is divided up in cubicles each with 2 sets of 3 level bunks, and you cant sit up in any of them other than the bottom, of course we had a middle and a top so I think I will permanently have a creak in my neck after the journey. Mary konked it for the first about 5 hours of the trip somehow while me and my traveling friend Nintendo DS passed a few hours. It wasn’t too bad, even for a 14 hour train journey all throughout the day, not half as uncomfortable as a bus would be over such duration. And all the Chinese people were very nice, loads of them were stopping and trying to talk to us, offering us food and even one of the staff came down asking me if I liked English movies, an hour later he comes back with an ancient portable DVD player blaring our Michael Jackson videos, very funny.

The train got into Xian at about 9pm and we exited into big bustling squares that always surround Chinese train stations, they are always jammed. NO sign of the hostel people to pick us up so we grabbed something to eat and went to an internet café to get our address written in Chinese to show to a taxi driver. Not that it helps much anyhow though. Xian is another city where the taxi drivers seem to prefer just cruising about for show rather than picking anybody up. Even if they do stop for you I think it is only to have a bit of a look at the foreigner because they quickly tell you they are not going there. I think the only place worth letting you into their car for is a fare to Beijing. Don’t think they want money. We ended up getting the bus and constantly looking out the window to see if we could spot something that looked like a bell tower lit up at night. We got lucky and spotted it, hard to miss actually since the entire old town of Xian is built around it and then it was about a 12 minute walk to the hostel after we asked a few people for directions. Pretty easy by china standards, looks like we might be able to get around this city.

We checked into our hostel the xiangiamen and our room although in the basement and windowless was actually really nice. The hostel is pretty big and well run. It’s fairly new and has been built in a traditional style with an old style courtyard and woodwork, our room was paneled in traditional carvings and the bed was mattresses on a big brick table in the corner. Very nice, there is a bar n the hostel too so we went upstairs to have a drink. The bar, even though in the back of the hostel is more popular with the locals and it was three quarters full of Xian residents, outside in the courtyard there was a table or two of foreigners including a bunch of backpackers playing drinking games, we left them to it and relaxed over our tsing daos after our long day traveling.

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