Monday, October 27

Today, being my day off, I decided to walk on the city wall. Xian has had walls almost since its beginnings. Most of the group went up there during our first week. They rented bicycles and rode around the walls. It’s a long trip. The bike rental gives you 100 minutes and they barely made it back in time. Of course they stopped for lots of pictures. There are also options to rent a bicycle rickshaw or a small electric bus. I wasn’t too happy with either option because I wanted to take pictures. So I started walking. I really loved it up there. It was a little cold and gray so there was little traffic and I had a lovely time going from the outside wall to look at newer areas back to the inside wall where there were mostly older areas. There’s a lot of new stuff inside the walls, but they haven’t gotten around to urban renewing the stuff immediately adjacent to the walls on the inside.

I walked to the third gate, called Hanguang, and decided I’d had enough. I was getting cold and tired and it was near lunchtime. There was a funny quonset hut like thing to enter and it was warm inside. A small sign invited me to visit the museum. I had no idea what that was about; there was nothing in the guidebook. Down the stairs I found myself in a beautiful, new modern building housing a large excavation in the center and some stele and other objects with calligraphy on them along the second floor walls. This second floor was the Xian Museum of Calligraphy and the first floor was the Museum of the Hanguang Gate Remains. It was really extraordinary. I spent quite a lot of time there finding out how the city walls had changed over the centuries. If I was a little more interested, there is enough material for a fascinating study.

I walked out and got a taxi to the Muslim section again. So far, this is my favorite part of the city. It is the most like an old city with all of the tiny shops, wonderful aromas, lots of people milling about the streets, which are narrow and don’t allow for cars or buses. Of course, you could always get run over by a bicycle. I skipped the tourist junk and just walked along the food street, inspecting all the offerings. I don’t eat very much these days, my heart meds seem to have put the brakes on my appetite, but I’m still interested in looking. I was hungry; it was lunchtime; but I wanted the exact right thing.

I didn’t want meat again. There were large vats of potatoes, lots of pancake type things, some other stuff I didn’t recognize. Finally I found a bread that looked appealing. It almost looked like a small pizza, round and flat, but it was covered with spices—peppers and zatar. After determining that I understood it would be spicy they heated the bread, then sliced it like a pizza and gave it to me in a small plastic sack. I contentedly munched on bread and spices as I continued walking around the market.

I have more to write, but I just found I could access the blog so I’m posting this. Maybe I will only have access on alternate days.

Artifacts in the wall museum

Early part of the Huangang gate

Entrance to the museum in the wall

View inside the wall

City wall guard

Changing of the guard

Trash can

Building on the wall

Sign on the wall

City wall from below

Read Full Post »