The Great Change: Turning Cathy into a Lawyer

When we had booked the tour for Xian they told us it would be in English. But early the morning of it, when the tour guide called to say when she'd be coming to pick us up at our hotel, it became clear that she would not be speaking English to us. But she managed to say that she would give our number to her colleagues and someone who did speak English would call us instead. Just to be sure, though, we called them, and they assured us that someone who spoke English would indeed pick us up. But then, way earlier than we expected, we got a call telling us they were downstairs already. So we went down and met the guide, who tried to load us on the bus. "English?" we asked, incredulously after watching everyone else board. "No English," she said. Uh huh…

To their credit they didn't just blow us off. They apparently called their office to find out what the story was and then got another tour guide, who would not be speaking English to us but who did technically speak a bit more of it, to explain to us to go back to our hotel to wait for the English-speaking guide to call us. Which perhaps is what would have happened all along, but it was hard to tell and we suddenly became worried that we wouldn't get on any bus. What we really wanted was the organized transport to the sites out of town, more than we really cared about the explanations. But then the English-speaking tour guide showed up after all and it all worked out. He picked us up in an overcrowded minivan, which then took us to the actual bus. I ended up squished in the backseat between people speaking some sort of Semitic language. At first it was very awkward - I was a stranger who had totally invaded their space. But I was curious about where they were from, so I asked them. "Israel." "Oh, I've been there!" (This is getting to be quite a regular exclamation from me upon inquiries like these...) That broke the ice and I chatted with them throughout the day.

This tour was different than the one in Beijing because it wasn't inclusive. It covered the bus and the guide, but not entrance fees or lunch. I suddenly felt very cheap, and even though technically some of these places only cost a few dollars, I decided to skip some of them (which was also necessary because we didn't actually have enough cash between us for both of us to see everything). The first stop was some ancient baths, which sounds interesting but the guidebook said was nothing special. Koichi went in and liked it, but I stayed outside and hung out with the Israelis. We talked about the most recent terrorist threat (they hadn't heard about it) and a little about the war (the bombs were still falling on Haifa) and a little about my relatives (the ones who had come from Harbin), whom I've lost touch with. One of the girls said if I could get her their names she would try to look them up.

Then I think the bus went to a museum, although this was one of the sites that sort of blended into everything else. It wasn't a bad museum (my guidebook liked it) but by then I'd seen a lot of artifacts. Oh, and there had been another stop: the official terra cotta factory. Like the jade factory it seems to be an official place where they do these crafts and then charge tourists Western prices for items in their enormous gift shops. But the explanation on how the terra cotta soldiers are made was helpful for later when we got to see the original ones.

But before we got to the site of the terra cotta warriors we ended up at a lunch place. It was a bit chaotic: an enormous room with large tables that we somewhat randomly sat at. The menu was also all in Chinese, except for one paper that listed a few things in English, yet without any prices. Hoping for the best, gastronomically and financially, Koichi and I picked out the fried vegetable dish (sort of standard Chinese collard greens) and a dish that turned out to be sweet and sour pork. (It's a hard thing to order over there, since everyone translates it into English differently.) Everyone ate, and then the bill came, which was a mess because some meals had been cheap and some were really expensive. Fortunately ours was in the middle, but some people got some sticker shock, plus it was really awkward to try to sort this out with strangers. As well as difficult, since the bill was all in Chinese.

After lunch we crossed the street and went into the grounds of the terra cotta soldiers' museum. In the 1970s a farmer had tried to sink a well and accidentally pulled out a fragment of soldier. In fact, the story goes that he pulled out a head and used it as a scarecrow for a while. But then he showed it to local officials, who ended up doing a big excavation. The area is now housed under a big hangar-like building, because what they found when they dug was an enormous underground tomb complex guarded by thousands of life-sized terra cotta soldiers. They haven't even dug them all up yet, but the display is already massive.

Our guides, who were very nice if maybe not so adept with keeping the group together, started us out by giving us some explanations and then we had some time to wander before meeting up again to go back to the bus. Unfortunately not everyone met up at the rendezvous point. One of these absent people was a Japanese man who may not have understood the instruction. The other people were some stupid Spaniards, if I may editorialize, who chattered away on the bus while the guide was talking and then took off on their own once we got inside and thus never heard any further instructions about where to meet up. As a result, the whole group got delayed while the guides tried to figure out where they were. Eventually they had us take the park shuttle back to the parking lot, where we discovered the Spaniards, and if I seem a bit hostile to them it's because they yelled at the guide for being late, when it had really been their fault that everything got fouled up. Unfortunately we were never able to find the Japanese man, which is concerning, although we did wait quite a while and one guide stayed behind to search again. We hope he just gave up at some point and took a cab back to town.

The tour bus made for an interesting group, though. As far as I could tell I was only one of two Americans. There were scads of Spaniards, the Israelis, several Japanese, some Swedes, two Irish people, plus lots more people whose origin I never ascertained. The guides spoke English well enough to be understandable on the tour, but it's clearly a skill they were still developing. As a result it was hard for some of these tourists who didn't speak English as their first language either to connect with them. But I could, particularly with the male guide. He would patiently wait while I patiently tried to find a way to make the gist of my questions come across. This apparently earned his trust, because there was a point where I actually translated English for English in order to help him answer a question a non-native English-speaking tourist had asked. After the person had asked the question, and the guide had clearly not understood, he looked towards me to help him out. So I restated it, capturing the essence of what the person had wanted to know, and then the guide was able to give his answer.

There was one more stop on the tour before we got back to the city, which was a scaled-down recreation of an ancient emperor's tomb. It was kind of cheesy visually, but informative historically as they explained how and why it was made. It had been a spectacular undertaking, with rivers of mercury and mountains of gold under a ceiling of diamond constellations, all combining to represent the Chinese empire.

And then it was time to go back to Xian, where we arrived at the Bell Tower at dusk. The lights were starting to come on and the streets come alive in those early evening hours. It was a little hazy, but otherwise quite pleasant. We walked around a teeny bit, then grabbed dinner and went back to the hotel to play Uno.