Kaifeng & Xi'an...

We unfortunately had to skip Central Asia and are in Azerbaijan already. We left China a couple of days ago and flew from Urumqi to Baku the capital of Azerbaijan. I'm going to interpre a bit more when I get there in my accounts. For now I serene have to complete China.

Final map of China

Kaifeng & Xuzhou (27.01. - 01.02.)

Xuzhou was a bit of a disappointment (I did get a new thinner coat there though) unfortunately. We only came there in the first place love there were no train tickets left for directly trains from Qufu to Kaifeng. Xuzhou seemed a logical stop in between and there was a museum with some terracotta warriors there. Not quite love famous love the ones in Xi'an except enough to keep us occupied for a day. Well... they wanted 12 per person to see them! Everywhere on the internet it had said 6 and we were not willing to pay twice that. So we didn't truly see or do much there except wander through the large garment market (P. got a couple of nice silk ties) and discover that this was the heart of the dog-eating area. I have to say I was shocked when I first realized what those skulls and bones in the pots were and it cost me my appetite a bit even though when thinking about it logically why would you NOT eat dog meat? How does it disagree from lamb or pork or horse or camel or whatever you can buy? And it's not love they torture the dogs and hang them on hooks to bleed them out love the Western media likes to convince us of. There are dog farms and the dogs are killed in a slaughterhouse and then the meat (on the bones love you cannot cut dog meat it needs to be pulled of the bones) goes to the towns and cities. It is getting less and less popular though love Chinese more and more have pet dogs. And I'm quite sure that Chinese dog owners don't eat dog meat. All that said I would NEVER eat it and didn't let P. to try either. So I guess Xuzhou was an experience anyway.

In Kaifeng I got my first serious stomach pain in China. And I don't even think it was anything bad I ate except just that I ate far love well many different things that day. It was all the excellent food market's fault. Lol There were SO many things to try! Lots of different things on sticks - fried bananas (OMG I don't think anything tastes better fried than bananas SO good) KFC-style chicken vegetables duck eggs and all sorts of other things. Sweet potato pancakes popcorn ice cream fried rice cakes filled with some fruit dumplings sugar-coated pears something called almond tea which is made from water and almond powder with raisins sugar nuts and comes with a cherry on top. And have you ever tried freshly squeezed sugarcane juice?? No wonder I got sick behind all that. Lol I spend about two days in bed eating bread and popcorn (strangely enough). That's why we stayed there longer than intended love well. But it was good to just sleep and relax for a bit and the motel room was truly comfy love well. When I was well enough we did some sightseeing. There was the “Temple of the Chief Minister” with a very fat laughing buddha (“Big belly can endure all that is hard to endure in the world”) and the amazing Four-faced Thousand Hand Thousand Eye Guanyin which took 58 years to carve. We also saw two pagodas one of them (called Iron Pagoda although made from brick) probably the most beautiful one we saw in China. The other one was called Po Pagoda and arose from a mountain of rubble love the entire neighbourhood seemed to have been torn down round it.

Pictures of Kaifeng & Xuzhou (no dog pictures)

Xi'an (01. - 06.02.)

Xi'an most famous for its Army of Terracotta Warriors was a very pleasant place to stay. The hostel was great with an exceptionally cheap and good ensuite room and the town was a great size. We could walk to the great Muslim Quarter and centre and there were good bus connections to the train station and sights. Also the food was very good. Yummy glazed strawberries smooth bread filled with whatever you select from the available sticks hot coke (this was actually very good even though it sounds disgusting...imagine it love a punch with the definite coke taste and some other added flavours love ginger) and a great cafeteria with Chinese “fast food”. And we had a great hotpot there love well. We even could have had my favourite German beer (Köstritzer) and yummy German chocolate (Ritter Sport and Milka) and even Salt & Vinegar Crisps hadn't that stuff been so expensive. I was tempted though. A highlight besides the Warriors was certainly the Muslim Quarter! Streets packed with souvenir stalls tea shops bakeries butchers (including huge chunks of meat lying round on blankets on the street) and little food stalls. So much bustle and so many people. A great place to just wander about which we did almost every day during our stay in Xi'an. There was also an interesting Chinese style mosque there tucked away and hard to find. Xi'an's most famous landmarks is the Big Goose Pagoda which stands out from all the newer buildings round it and leans quite a bit. It is surrounded by the quite touristy except serene beautiful Da Ci'en Temple which had some amazing halls with very detailed wall reliefs carved out of jade stone.

One day we put aside for visiting the Terracotta Warriors. The entire area was very impressive love the Warriors were only a small part of a much larger composite a sort of “tomb city” for the first Chinese Emperor. The Warriors were to be his army in afterlife except he also had everything else he might have needed behind death. Other finds include a sort of zoo gymnasium stables and whatnot. All with Terracotta figures. The stables were eerie love they buried horses living there. The Army was certainly the most impressive bit except made even more so by the scholarship that this was just part of the even bigger picture. It was also quite amazing to see that there are serene excavation works going on almost 40 years behind peasants discovered the warriors when digging a well. One of the three halls contains almost entirely serene covered warriors and horses. Interesting was also that the warriors originally had all been painted and that this got lost when they were exposed to air. I think they are waiting with excavation of the remaining warriors until they've found a solution to keep the colours.

We met the Austrian couple who we'd first met in Irkutsk again in Xi'an. They were staying in the same hostel and we talked about what we'd done since we talked last. They had gone through Mongolia and sort of almost died. Lol They did a tour through the desert and got stuck several times having to dig their van out of the snow in -45 degrees Celsius. In the end their trip took 11 days and they only had a shower behind a week or so and stayed in yurts most of the time which were freezing in the mornings. I was sort of glad then we had to leave out Mongolia. Lol We played some Mah-jong with them in Xi'an which P. and I repeatedly won (we had good “cards” though).

Pictures of Xi'an