No Snow Just Zero
The last four days during which I have been totally away from my laptop... were spent with family. A most informative tidbit of information, isn't that? Doesn't that kind of sentence make you hang on the edge of your seat hankering for more details? No? How disappointed I am.
Anyway, last Friday evening (around 5), we left the flat and went onto a train. We were very nearly late, because it's a half-hour ride from the flat to the train station and passengers are expected to be at the station at least 15 minutes before the train departs or else there isn't enough time to run across all the platforms and get to your cabin, you see. Train tickets, here, are separated into many categories: the soft-sleepers and hard-sleepers are self-explanatory. Then there are the seating-only tickets, where you may sit on the various chairs nailed to the train cabin walls but not sleep on a bed, and the standing-only tickets where you're not even allowed to sit (and yes, there are checks to make sure of that). Our family took 7 soft-sleeper tickets, so we got 1 and 3/4 cabins (there are four beds per cabin). In effect, however, we got two; soft-sleeper tickets are so expensive (more expensive in fact than a plane ticket of identical destination/origins), that very few other people were in our compartment and so we roamed about quite freely--which, of course, means a great deal of photography occurred and the few other passengers, plus the occasional train worker passing through, asked such things as where we were from (five kids in tow--no chance of even pretending to be locals!) and whether we had any of our own country's money.
Unfortunately none of us had anything of the sort. (In case you were wondering, we placed Oreo into safe keeping with a friendly family for the trip. She just got back and is busy being fussed over.)
We had dinner on the train--we brought our own little containers of instant noodles, and cooked them with the hot-water from the train's dispenser, then finished off with preserved fruits and biscuits. Not the most amazing dinner ever, but it was punctuated by chatter and the occasional camera flash going off. Dinner ended and then the Empress took out a guidebook and my dad took out his laptop... and we began a pop quiz about Western Peace (our destination), during which I fell asleep and went off to the other cabin (less noisy, less crowded) when I woke up and decided I wanted a more comfortable place to fall asleep in.
Unfortunately that night's sleep didn't go so well: I was woken up by my brothers, who turned the lights on and chattered until I woke up and shooed them out. A short while later they came back in and had to be shooed out again, and the third time I woke up to the sound of them snoring in harmony and couldn't get back to sleep because the cabin walls are thin and I kept on hearing the chatter of the people in the cabin directly beside my head. Not to mention that the train ride was bumpy and a lot of swaying occurred, plus for some reason it wasn't a direct route and the train made a lot of stops on the way.
We woke up the next day, at 5.30 or so, and got off the train and were bused to our hotel where we got rooms and watched local TV until about 7.30, upon which we bundled ourselves up in layers and layers of clothing (the average was about 4 layers), and went out walking for a local breakfast. We walked, and walked, and walked in the cold air (about -2 or something like that), and the biting wind made it feel at least five degrees colder. We actually began eating around 8.15 or so (yes, we walked for at least 45 minutes in freezing conditions, trailing vapour as we went), when we grabbed some hot buns (and paid for them) from a roadside stall. I think that was why we walked into a restaurant a few minutes later and had a waitress get us what she recommended as "local flavour".
The rest of that day--let me see, what was it?... ah yes. My photographs are extremely helpful here... The street we were on for breakfast and the hot buns is called Huiming Street, and basically is a sort of tourist spot where hundreds of vendors and little stalls have food and souvenirs for sale. So after breakfast, we went strolling around to see all that food and souvenirs, and did so until lunch with only two of us getting lost, which was understandable: with all of us bundled up, it was easy to mistake any other bunch of hats or scarves or jackets and follow it until it turned out to be mistaken identity. In any case that only happened once, and we simply backtracked until we (my little sister and I) found the main group again. We were then taken to a very sumptuous lunch by some friends of the parents, which we couldn't finish and consequently left a lot of leftovers of (rather unfortunate really, since some of that food was awesome).
After that we went walking around the few blocks around the hotel, getting acquainted with the place and the sights, dropping in on a few shops to get their hopes up and then disappoint them with the familial miserliness (though it must be said if we find anything worth buying, we do tend to buy it). We had a bit of dinner, since the lunch was still heavy on our collective stomach, and retired to bed.
The next morning we woke early: the hotel buffet breakfast begins at 7.30 and our itinerary was scheduled to begin at 8.15, so we woke, washed, and swarmed down to the restaurant. My family's strategy with regards to buffets is relatively simple: take a bit of everything, eat it all, and return for seconds of whatever you liked. We came, we saw, we gobbled, we left no leftovers this time.
Our travel agent had considerately supplied us with a tour guide as well as a bus for transportation--the tour guide was necessary to get us reduced rates on entrance tickets--and we spent the morning looking at the three (so far) pits of terracotta warriors, with a great deal of side information from the tour guide about the histories, the backgrounds, the discoveries, and suchlike. They were impressive though, and my dad got quite impatient with the tour guide's tendency to try to hurry us through the place... on the other hand, my dad seemed to be trying to take a snapshot of each indivicual terracotta figure in an effort to verify that no two of them are alike. (He has a very powerful camera.)
Calling them "pits", though, is rather a misleading sort of term since they're actually huge rectangular cavities in the ground, apparently accessed (when they were built) by downward slopes. "Pits" just brings to mind some crude little hole sunken into the ground, and these things were definitely not crude.
We finished seeing those terracotta figures around lunchtime, and then headed at the tour guide's behest to a large room full of expensive souvenirs--the only place we went where the tour guide encouraged us to take our time. My dad later said that the tour guide came so cheap mainly because they have a sort of commission with the shopkeepers, which may also be why those things were so incredibly expensive--all manner of things from jade to stone to pottery to plastic, and very few of those things going for less than four digits.
We had lunch at the nearby KFC's, and then it was on to the Qin Mausoleum, which is actually a long series of steps along which old peddlers peddle, and along the way are bits of description of the mausoleum extracted from contemporary writings and suchlike: the actual mausoleum isn't going to be opened, said the tour guide, until facilities for preserving it and some technique for recovering it is developed, because no human can enter it for awhile due to the toxicity--part of the description of the place includes "rivers and seas of mercury", which are both pretty and deadly.
After that (or before? I'm not quite sure) was a large place (I think it was after now), in the mountains, where the most favoured of the ancient emperors' concubines (most famously Concubine Yang) would bathe in the local hot springs. We went trooping around the place staring at large empty stone hollows, learning about the carving process and the rituals to be observed by the different people to use each pool, and why each pool was reserved for a particular rank of the hierarchy, etc. They also had pools for rent, but those were too shallow and tiny to be of any good to a family of 7. It didn't make any sense really, since the were huge pools and the guide had repeatedly mentioned how the mountains are just riddled with hot springs and all you need to do is stick a shovel in the ground to be inundated with 43 C water (which is a lot compared to the -4 or so of the air).
We went up that, we went down again, and we went back to the hotel for a short time before coming out again and going back to Huiming Street for dinner and more shopping, during which we discovered that our family has a habit of, when finding a peddler selling delicious wares, congregating around that peddler and essentially forming a little roadblock while we buy more and more of the food until forcibly dragged away (or another peddler catches our attention). We did that with the old lady selling pear tea, and later on we were congregating around some shiny things while another old lady (a lot of old ladies are peddlers, or the other way 'round) hawked sugarcane juice until we turned around to buy some, and then she had five of us to satisfy, repeatedly.
We eventually decided we'd had enough shopping, and then returned to the hotel with promises of waking late next morning and then getting ready to leave Western Peace.
We woke around 8.15, with breakfast being at 8.30, so we again swarmed the buffet table--except that we'd already swarmed it the day before and the menu hadn't really changed, so we went straight to the get-all-you-prefer part and I ended up with lots of cereal under yogurt, thin strips of ham, fried eggs (sunny side up and with soy sauce), sausages, and various other salty, sweet, and savoury things. I don't eat sour things that often.
The only things on the itinerary that day (actually it's now yesterday) were a couple of towers and some cycling: thus the breakfast was huge, and long, and mom proposed that it suffice for lunch as well (considering the time we left--around 11--it did). We packed up everything in the hotel rooms, and checked out before loading everything onto the bus and setting out for the two towers of Western Peace. Apparently they date from the 1300's, and are a great source of pride for the city--not so much income though, since they contain rather pitiable shops and get rather less customers. The bell tower, the drum tower (both used at different times in different situations), and then...
Western Peace, you see, is a very old place. It is also very square, with four gates and four walls encompassing what used to be the royal quarters and now is most of the city--the perimeter is 13.9km. Outside the walls is where the ministers and other bigwigs would live--close to the royalty--and then an even greater ring around that was for the commoners. We went cycling on that wall: bicycles are rented for RMB 20 per person per 100 minutes. And I mean on the wall, not inside or outside it, so as we cycled we got treated to the view of the entire city's rooftops and pointed out the hotel, or the towers, or (in the distance) the mountains we'd been looking at.
The wind was very cold and very strong, and the wall top (about fifteen meters wide by my estimate) was bumpy with potholes so one's energy was more used to get the bicycle out of holes and jittery spots than for actual propulsion, and the walls along the rooftop were maybe waist high and no good at all to us because they had little holes punched in them--maybe for ancient archers, I guess. It was fun, though my fingers went numb even through the thick double-layered gloves I was wearing and I had to keep my hood up or risk my ears going numb too. It was terribly difficult to breathe through the scarf without fogging up my glasses, but despite all these we managed to cycle the 13.9 km in only 120 minutes, with occasional stops for a hot cup of tea from the thermoses we were carrying, or to swap gloves (my kid brother and the Gobbler were wearing fingerless gloves which were, to put it mildly, not a good idea), or for some sweets my mom had gotten from goodness knows where, but were a nice mini-sugar rush all the same, or for photo shoots with the entire city as backdrop.
After that, we went to the airport, had dinner, and had a flight back (the plane tickets, incidentally, were cheaper than the train tickets), and now I'm here typing this up. We'd hoped for snow, given the below-zero temperatures, but the guide said (with a little malicious glee, I think, because we hadn't bought anything and so he'd got no commissions) that snow might only fall around the 30th when the temperatures fall below -30.
Anyway, last Friday evening (around 5), we left the flat and went onto a train. We were very nearly late, because it's a half-hour ride from the flat to the train station and passengers are expected to be at the station at least 15 minutes before the train departs or else there isn't enough time to run across all the platforms and get to your cabin, you see. Train tickets, here, are separated into many categories: the soft-sleepers and hard-sleepers are self-explanatory. Then there are the seating-only tickets, where you may sit on the various chairs nailed to the train cabin walls but not sleep on a bed, and the standing-only tickets where you're not even allowed to sit (and yes, there are checks to make sure of that). Our family took 7 soft-sleeper tickets, so we got 1 and 3/4 cabins (there are four beds per cabin). In effect, however, we got two; soft-sleeper tickets are so expensive (more expensive in fact than a plane ticket of identical destination/origins), that very few other people were in our compartment and so we roamed about quite freely--which, of course, means a great deal of photography occurred and the few other passengers, plus the occasional train worker passing through, asked such things as where we were from (five kids in tow--no chance of even pretending to be locals!) and whether we had any of our own country's money.
Unfortunately none of us had anything of the sort. (In case you were wondering, we placed Oreo into safe keeping with a friendly family for the trip. She just got back and is busy being fussed over.)
We had dinner on the train--we brought our own little containers of instant noodles, and cooked them with the hot-water from the train's dispenser, then finished off with preserved fruits and biscuits. Not the most amazing dinner ever, but it was punctuated by chatter and the occasional camera flash going off. Dinner ended and then the Empress took out a guidebook and my dad took out his laptop... and we began a pop quiz about Western Peace (our destination), during which I fell asleep and went off to the other cabin (less noisy, less crowded) when I woke up and decided I wanted a more comfortable place to fall asleep in.
Unfortunately that night's sleep didn't go so well: I was woken up by my brothers, who turned the lights on and chattered until I woke up and shooed them out. A short while later they came back in and had to be shooed out again, and the third time I woke up to the sound of them snoring in harmony and couldn't get back to sleep because the cabin walls are thin and I kept on hearing the chatter of the people in the cabin directly beside my head. Not to mention that the train ride was bumpy and a lot of swaying occurred, plus for some reason it wasn't a direct route and the train made a lot of stops on the way.
We woke up the next day, at 5.30 or so, and got off the train and were bused to our hotel where we got rooms and watched local TV until about 7.30, upon which we bundled ourselves up in layers and layers of clothing (the average was about 4 layers), and went out walking for a local breakfast. We walked, and walked, and walked in the cold air (about -2 or something like that), and the biting wind made it feel at least five degrees colder. We actually began eating around 8.15 or so (yes, we walked for at least 45 minutes in freezing conditions, trailing vapour as we went), when we grabbed some hot buns (and paid for them) from a roadside stall. I think that was why we walked into a restaurant a few minutes later and had a waitress get us what she recommended as "local flavour".
The rest of that day--let me see, what was it?... ah yes. My photographs are extremely helpful here... The street we were on for breakfast and the hot buns is called Huiming Street, and basically is a sort of tourist spot where hundreds of vendors and little stalls have food and souvenirs for sale. So after breakfast, we went strolling around to see all that food and souvenirs, and did so until lunch with only two of us getting lost, which was understandable: with all of us bundled up, it was easy to mistake any other bunch of hats or scarves or jackets and follow it until it turned out to be mistaken identity. In any case that only happened once, and we simply backtracked until we (my little sister and I) found the main group again. We were then taken to a very sumptuous lunch by some friends of the parents, which we couldn't finish and consequently left a lot of leftovers of (rather unfortunate really, since some of that food was awesome).
After that we went walking around the few blocks around the hotel, getting acquainted with the place and the sights, dropping in on a few shops to get their hopes up and then disappoint them with the familial miserliness (though it must be said if we find anything worth buying, we do tend to buy it). We had a bit of dinner, since the lunch was still heavy on our collective stomach, and retired to bed.
The next morning we woke early: the hotel buffet breakfast begins at 7.30 and our itinerary was scheduled to begin at 8.15, so we woke, washed, and swarmed down to the restaurant. My family's strategy with regards to buffets is relatively simple: take a bit of everything, eat it all, and return for seconds of whatever you liked. We came, we saw, we gobbled, we left no leftovers this time.
Our travel agent had considerately supplied us with a tour guide as well as a bus for transportation--the tour guide was necessary to get us reduced rates on entrance tickets--and we spent the morning looking at the three (so far) pits of terracotta warriors, with a great deal of side information from the tour guide about the histories, the backgrounds, the discoveries, and suchlike. They were impressive though, and my dad got quite impatient with the tour guide's tendency to try to hurry us through the place... on the other hand, my dad seemed to be trying to take a snapshot of each indivicual terracotta figure in an effort to verify that no two of them are alike. (He has a very powerful camera.)
Calling them "pits", though, is rather a misleading sort of term since they're actually huge rectangular cavities in the ground, apparently accessed (when they were built) by downward slopes. "Pits" just brings to mind some crude little hole sunken into the ground, and these things were definitely not crude.
We finished seeing those terracotta figures around lunchtime, and then headed at the tour guide's behest to a large room full of expensive souvenirs--the only place we went where the tour guide encouraged us to take our time. My dad later said that the tour guide came so cheap mainly because they have a sort of commission with the shopkeepers, which may also be why those things were so incredibly expensive--all manner of things from jade to stone to pottery to plastic, and very few of those things going for less than four digits.
We had lunch at the nearby KFC's, and then it was on to the Qin Mausoleum, which is actually a long series of steps along which old peddlers peddle, and along the way are bits of description of the mausoleum extracted from contemporary writings and suchlike: the actual mausoleum isn't going to be opened, said the tour guide, until facilities for preserving it and some technique for recovering it is developed, because no human can enter it for awhile due to the toxicity--part of the description of the place includes "rivers and seas of mercury", which are both pretty and deadly.
After that (or before? I'm not quite sure) was a large place (I think it was after now), in the mountains, where the most favoured of the ancient emperors' concubines (most famously Concubine Yang) would bathe in the local hot springs. We went trooping around the place staring at large empty stone hollows, learning about the carving process and the rituals to be observed by the different people to use each pool, and why each pool was reserved for a particular rank of the hierarchy, etc. They also had pools for rent, but those were too shallow and tiny to be of any good to a family of 7. It didn't make any sense really, since the were huge pools and the guide had repeatedly mentioned how the mountains are just riddled with hot springs and all you need to do is stick a shovel in the ground to be inundated with 43 C water (which is a lot compared to the -4 or so of the air).
We went up that, we went down again, and we went back to the hotel for a short time before coming out again and going back to Huiming Street for dinner and more shopping, during which we discovered that our family has a habit of, when finding a peddler selling delicious wares, congregating around that peddler and essentially forming a little roadblock while we buy more and more of the food until forcibly dragged away (or another peddler catches our attention). We did that with the old lady selling pear tea, and later on we were congregating around some shiny things while another old lady (a lot of old ladies are peddlers, or the other way 'round) hawked sugarcane juice until we turned around to buy some, and then she had five of us to satisfy, repeatedly.
We eventually decided we'd had enough shopping, and then returned to the hotel with promises of waking late next morning and then getting ready to leave Western Peace.
We woke around 8.15, with breakfast being at 8.30, so we again swarmed the buffet table--except that we'd already swarmed it the day before and the menu hadn't really changed, so we went straight to the get-all-you-prefer part and I ended up with lots of cereal under yogurt, thin strips of ham, fried eggs (sunny side up and with soy sauce), sausages, and various other salty, sweet, and savoury things. I don't eat sour things that often.
The only things on the itinerary that day (actually it's now yesterday) were a couple of towers and some cycling: thus the breakfast was huge, and long, and mom proposed that it suffice for lunch as well (considering the time we left--around 11--it did). We packed up everything in the hotel rooms, and checked out before loading everything onto the bus and setting out for the two towers of Western Peace. Apparently they date from the 1300's, and are a great source of pride for the city--not so much income though, since they contain rather pitiable shops and get rather less customers. The bell tower, the drum tower (both used at different times in different situations), and then...
Western Peace, you see, is a very old place. It is also very square, with four gates and four walls encompassing what used to be the royal quarters and now is most of the city--the perimeter is 13.9km. Outside the walls is where the ministers and other bigwigs would live--close to the royalty--and then an even greater ring around that was for the commoners. We went cycling on that wall: bicycles are rented for RMB 20 per person per 100 minutes. And I mean on the wall, not inside or outside it, so as we cycled we got treated to the view of the entire city's rooftops and pointed out the hotel, or the towers, or (in the distance) the mountains we'd been looking at.
The wind was very cold and very strong, and the wall top (about fifteen meters wide by my estimate) was bumpy with potholes so one's energy was more used to get the bicycle out of holes and jittery spots than for actual propulsion, and the walls along the rooftop were maybe waist high and no good at all to us because they had little holes punched in them--maybe for ancient archers, I guess. It was fun, though my fingers went numb even through the thick double-layered gloves I was wearing and I had to keep my hood up or risk my ears going numb too. It was terribly difficult to breathe through the scarf without fogging up my glasses, but despite all these we managed to cycle the 13.9 km in only 120 minutes, with occasional stops for a hot cup of tea from the thermoses we were carrying, or to swap gloves (my kid brother and the Gobbler were wearing fingerless gloves which were, to put it mildly, not a good idea), or for some sweets my mom had gotten from goodness knows where, but were a nice mini-sugar rush all the same, or for photo shoots with the entire city as backdrop.
After that, we went to the airport, had dinner, and had a flight back (the plane tickets, incidentally, were cheaper than the train tickets), and now I'm here typing this up. We'd hoped for snow, given the below-zero temperatures, but the guide said (with a little malicious glee, I think, because we hadn't bought anything and so he'd got no commissions) that snow might only fall around the 30th when the temperatures fall below -30.
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