Xi'an

03/10/13 

They say there’s no rest for the wicked and while I don’t think I’m wicked, we certainly didn’t get much rest! Despite having a busy day climbing all over the Great Wall of China, Rory and I were up nice and early to get packed for our next adventure, a trip to Xi’an. 

Rory obviously left all the hard work to me and flounced off to get his hair cut. Note to self; don’t let Rory go to the Chinese hairdressers by himself, he will come back with the rarest haircut you have ever seen! With bag packing and terrible haircuts out of the way we donned our rucksacks and headed towards Beijing West Station. Unfortunately when we got to our transfer station the line running to Beijing West Station seemed to be closed so we had no choice but to walk and hope we were walking in the right direction! After about 20 sweaty minutes we found the station and it was absolutely mental. I have never seen so many transport related people. Hundreds were sitting on any inch of available pavement. Some were playing games and some were having a wee snooze! The chaos didn’t stop when we got inside and frantically tried to find out what platform we were on because funnily enough, all the signs were in Chinese!

Beijing West Station

An orderly queue

 Eventually we found where we were meant to go and we joined yet another “queue”. I use the word queue lightly here because in China they haven’t quite grasped the concept and just walk in front of each other, pushing wildly as they go. When the gates finally opened we went straight on to the train and found our seats easily. We paid about £50 each for our second class seats which were surprisingly spacious so we happily got settled and began the six hour journey! Not long after we left the station we drove past our apartment which was actually really exciting! Well... maybe not that exciting but it was pretty cool, for us anyway!

Our apartment, right in the middle

 While I’m not super in to trains, it was cooling being on a high speed train. The train can go up to 250mph but the fastest we went was 190mph which is still quite fast. It was also really smooth, like you were just floating along. I felt like I was in The Simpsons, on the monorail, without the near crash. Monorail. Monorail. Monorail.

 The journey went quickly and we arrived at Xi’an North Station where we took the metro in to the centre of town. When we got off the first thing we saw was the Bell Tower which is pretty impressive! It’s also pretty impressive that we managed to find our hotel as the city is huge, extremely busy and everything seems to be under construction. They also don’t have any street signs which is incredibly annoying and caused us to make many a wrong turns before we found our trusty £20 a night Ibis Hotel. As it was a late one we got settled and did the most important thing of all – checked for English channels on the T.V. I can confirm that we have a movie channel complete with English movies that are all dubbed in Chinese and more importantly, a news channel! I can’t wait to spend the next week basking in the Chinese version of world news!