Ill in Xian
It was time for the worst of my illness to come back. I'd had about three days of feeling almost normal again, but it was nearly time for it to return with a little extra force than last time.
We arrived in Xian on a daytime train, which was a change from the overnight ones we'd been taking. We were mobbed by Chinese students on the train; they all wanted to talk to us and exchange email addresses, but only one of them seemed to speak any English. That helped the journey pass very quickly.
We got into Xian fairly late into the evening and fell into the hands of a tout who took us to a really grungy horrible hotel. We'd got an idea where we wanted to stay, and expected to spot it as we walked past, but he cunningly took us a longer way round through back alleys so that we wouldn't see the nicer places to stay.
We managed to do the obligatory trip to see the terracotta army, inspite of my needing frequent trips to the toilet. I wasn't as impressed by it as I expected to be; I find that this can often happen when you expect something to be really good, because it's so famous. Worth the trip out though. We were looking at the full size replicas in the souvenir shop, which of course we weren't at all interested in buying, but once the sales guy came over I had a problem: every time I said things like "no, I really don't want to buy one", he assumed I was haggling and named a lower price; the more vehement I made my protestations, the more the price came down. I managed to negotiate a ridiculous amount of money off before he understood what I meant!
We visited some of the other sites in Xian: the Drum Tower and the Bell Tower, the Big Goose Pagoda, and the Muslim Quarter.
Because I was feeling decidedly under the weather I wanted comforting food. Normally I'm all up for trying all of the local food, but I wasn't feeling up to it. One evening I'd ordered fried potatoes in a Chinese restaurant, but when they came they were more like grated raw potatoes. So, the next evening we went to McDonalds (one of a few we visited in our year away - it makes a real change from time-to-time, even though I almost never eat it at home), but I was still only able to eat half a regular fries.
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What a complete dive. We ended up stuck in this hotel because I was too ill to leave, and move anywhere else.
We got tricked into staying here a bit; we were met out of the station by a tout who took at to the hotel, and skilfully routed us via a back alleys so that we wouldn't see the more decent hotels.
The room didn't look so bad when we arrived, although we thought that RMB100 was a touch on the expensive side. The lobby of the hotel was immaculate, and had obviously been given a recent make over, but the carpet in the corridors was dirty, and there were regular spitoons, presumably for the use of the guests. The room was a bit grubby too. One wall consisted of a large curtain which gave the false impression that the room might have some windows, but it didn't. The lighting was dim so the room had a generally depressing feel.
The worst thing about the place, however, was that its main purpose seemed to be to serve as a place of work for all of the local "hairdressers"; the street on which the hotel was located was full of "hairdressers'" shops, all staffed by young girls in short skirts and high boots, wearing a lot of make up and sitting in front of their premises waiting for customers. At the Royal Hotel they could take advantage of the "o'clock rooms", which we later worked out meant rooms by the hour.
When I was finally well enough to get out of the room we moved a little closer to the station to the Shang-De hotel. This was much better, and it was a shame that we could only stay one night; after that we were leaving Xian to head to Chengdu. We even managed to pay less at the ShangDe than we had at the Royal.
