The tour guide in Beijing gave us a recommendation for where to get Peking Duck, but by the time we got back from the tour I needed food that was more expedient. Since I'd already tried out the restaurant in the hotel, I convinced Koichi to walk a block and a half to the restaurant on the ground floor of the big hotel on the corner. They handed us a glossy menu with pictures, but Koichi still had to read the captions to figure out what each dish really was. Even doing that though the meal did not come out quite how we expected. Too much food, and way too much MSG. (It wasn't just the menu that was glossy; the food was too…). The only high point was that I finally found sesame balls (unfortunately, they weren't very good – too much red bean paste). In the future we resolved to order more sensibly, picking out a meat dish we could both live with and ordering a vegetable dish to go with it, along with some rice.
Conveniently, flying eliminated the need to track down a meal, since they always served lunch on the flights, and the next day we had our flight to Xian. The tour guide had advised us to get out very early in order to catch the airport bus (traffic in Beijing is terrible) and gave us directions for where to catch it. It was in walking distance, but also deceptively far. Technically it was maybe only 2-3 blocks away, but I think it worked out to being at least a mile of walking, dragging our suitcases up and down stairways and ramps, over and under gigantic boulevards. But given the traffic jams we still had to wade through it was much better that we walked than if we'd tried to take a taxi.
The airport bus was based at a large hotel on one of Beijing's bigger streets. Like most of the buildings there it was set back from the street. Beijing isn't like Manhattan, with all the buildings right up against the curb; instead each property is like its own quiet island in a river of commotion. By the time we got to it it was getting ready to leave, so finding seats was a problem. We had to split up, and some people waved me to a free seat near them in the back. I ended up talking to them the whole way, which probably annoyed the people around us but oh well. They were a young Polish couple currently living in Warsaw who had been traveling around, so we had lots to talk about.
I thought Xian might be like Harbin but I was wrong: Xian expects tourists and is more set up for them. The airport bus, for instance, is marked in English and plenty of English-speaking people are there to advise tourists how to take it. They also sell tours, and since we were satisfied with the Beijing one we decided to book one for Xian. Though we were sure we could book another one elsewhere, this one seemed just as good as the next. “The tour is in English?” we asked, and they said yes.
Xian is an interesting city. Although Harbin and Shanghai have European architecture, Xian has more of a European city feel. It's big, bigger than you realize (even in ancient times it was the first city to have more than a million people), but it is well-planned and balanced with public spaces and squares so it feels less harsh. An ancient capital along the Silk Road, it was once a walled city, and even today the old part still has its wall surrounding it. Intersecting the city are big boulevards that extend out from the suburbs and meet in the center of the walled area at the Bell Temple (sort of like a Chinese Charles de Gaulle Etoille). The roads, radiating north, south, east, and west from the temple, are named accordingly.
We had two days in Xian, not counting the travel days, so the next day we decided to look at local things. In the morning we caught a city bus headed to the south of the city to see the Big Goose Pagoda. The pagoda itself was inside a larger complex, and that complex was inside a larger park area. That area was designed hundreds and hundreds of years ago, and today it still keeps its character as a public park filled with fountains, public sculpture, and open spaces. A sort of Asiatic Jardin du Luxembourg, in a way. The main roads leading up to it were being repaved and landscaped and it's clear that they've recently sunk some money into it to make it a really nice place. It had a visitor center where we could see old pictures of the city. What was amazing to realize from them, however, was how recently Xian was developed. We had made fun of our hotel room, for instance, because it was in a worn, crappy-looking building with tired interiors that looked like they were hip in the 70s. But we could see from the aerial shots that our building could not be older than 20, maybe 25 years. Even as recently as the 80s the town center, now a bustling, modern commercial area, was a series of low-rise buildings and houses. Nearly everything that we saw now was new, probably built within the last 15 years and maybe closer to the last 5. But in a way that is good, because, as my guidebook noted, modern architecture in China used to involve ugly concrete buildings with bathroom tiles stuck to the exteriors (e.g., our hotel). But the latest development seems to have much more sensible modern architecture and is much more aesthetically pleasing and usable. However, the recent development may come at a price: the infiltration of Western commercial interests. We kept noticing at the park large café umbrellas advertising KFC, and even an electronic trolley was covered in advertising for it. So we were hardly surprised when we walked out the northern side and found an actual, two-story KFC in one of the park buildings…
We decided to skip the Small Goose Pagoda and instead took the bus back north to the southern gate of the city. The walls were somewhat recently renovated and now you can walk on top of them around the entire perimeter. We didn't do that, but what I've since found out is that you can bike along the wall and that might have been fun. Oh well. Instead we walked along the outside in one of the park areas they've established. As near as I can tell the wall is ringed by a strip of open park space, and apparently also a moat. These features also give the city a very livable quality to it.
So I liked Xian, but I was starting to need some down/alone time, so I ended up parking myself in an enormous cybercafe as Koichi roamed around that evening on his own. Later on in the trip I did see a little more of the city (like walking through the Drum Temple into the edge of the Muslim Quarter) but I guess it's just as well that I didn't see everything since it means I may just have to go back.