XI'AN, CHINA: SLEEPING, EATING, AND STROLLING IN XI'AN

We were fortunate to start off our Grand Tour of China and the Stans with a night in the Wyndham Grand Xian South. Rated #1 on TripAdvisor among all the hotels in Xi'an, it was definitely one of the top hotels of our trip. I checked the price for a room there in November and found a fare of $92, which includes their incredible breakfast buffet. It's a steal.

The lobby has some fun props for photos:

John loved this terracotta warrior and tried to get the hotel to sell it to him:

From our window we could see an upscale neighborhood with a huge metropolis in the distance.  

Xi'an has a population of 8.6 million in the urban area, and 13.5 million in the metropolitan area. It is the 9th largest city in China. The only city in the United States that approaches that size is New York City. Right now in 2017, China has over 100 cities with a population greater than one million.  The US has TEN. China has a population of 1.379 billion, and the United States has a population of 323.1 million. The two countries cover roughly the same geographical area. Imagine roughly quadrupling the population of the United States and fitting all those people in our current land mass.  Wow.

Of course, air pollution in China is much worse than it is here. At this moment (November 4, 2017), the air quality index for Xi'an is 161, for Los Angeles it is 33, and for the city where I live it is 47. But then, it's easy to gloat when we have only a quarter of the population, isn't it?

One more thing: China has 33 UNESCO World Heritage sites and the United States has only 13.

But I digress.  Our hotel room was lovely and spacious and had a window between the bedroom and bathtub. (That's not a mirror in the second picture; it's a glass window.) It was weird, and something we would see again in a couple of other top hotels we stayed in. It at least had blinds that could be drawn to close off the window.

The snack basket was a lot of fun. I'm not used to seeing ramen noodles in my hotel room, but it's a great idea!

Breakfast the next morning was superb. The variety was incredible, and we especially appreciated the fact that it was at least 2/3 Chinese items and only 1/3 American/European.

Bob's plate doesn't contain a single American breakfast food:

I don't know if you can read the tag in the picture below, but it says "Six kinds of picky."  I think "picky" might refer to "pickled," but I can't remember if these were all pickled:

There were always lots of cold salads with interesting ingredients:

We had to drive for about 30 minutes to get to the Terracotta Warriors on our first morning, so we had a good exposure to the city. There is some pretty interesting landscaping:

The ubiquitous Burger King seems to be more popular than McDonald's:

This looks like a Colonel Sanders KFC spin-off:

At the end of a full day in Xi'an seeing the Terracotta Warriors and the Wild Goose Pagoda, we had a few hours in the late afternoon/early evening to take a stroll before a dinner show. Our hotel was in one of the wealthiest areas of the city, and we felt completely safe going out with our friends for a sightseeing walk. The area we were staying in is called the Qujiang New District, and was specifically created in 1993 for arts, luxury shopping, and tourism.

Right behind the Wyndham Grand Hotel is a mile-long pedestrian street called the "Great Tang All Day Mall."  It is a tribute to the Tang Dynasty (618-907 AD), which is the period during which the Great Wild Goose Pagoda was built.

"Mall" here refers to a long public promenade, not to a shopping district, although there was some of that.  Also, I'm not sure why it's called an "All Day" mall. Maybe because you want to see it in both the daylight and night hours?

Nine different sections have their own theme, including the religion, literature, art, and science of the Tang Dynasty. This section honors the music of China:

Another great sign:

Next is this fountain walk, which continues the music theme with some rather bizarrely-shaped female figures:

The most spectacular section of the Great Tang All Day Mall is Kai Yuan Square, which honors the seventh Tang Emperor, Xuan Zong (712-756). The long approach includes a water feature and eight massive columns:

As we got near, we could see that the Emperor is surrounded by over fifty larger-than-life-sized figures:

Musicians are on the bottom level:

. . .  and military men (bodyguards?) are on the upper level:

Standing in front of a sun disk decorated with an intricate golden dragon is the Emperor himself:

It's a "WOW" kind of display, meant to impress:

This fountain, with the Wild Goose Pagoda in the distance, appears to feature either Chinese writers or philosophers:

That guy on the right, with his Wild Goose Pagoda behind him, is Xuanzang, the Chinese Buddhist Monk who greatly expanded Buddhism in China:

We decided to veer off the All Day Mall and into the surrounding neighborhood.

I got a kick out of these feminine quilted motorcycle covers that fit over the handlebars. We decided they most be meant for keeping the hands and legs warm, as well as for providing a bit of modesty for women drivers:

The apartment buildings in this very posh neighborhood are well-protected by several layers of barbed wire and electric fencing:

Just a reminder: NO ZZZZZZZ AT THE WHEEL!  (Methinks if you need this, your eyes are already closed anyway.)

As one would expect in a city this size, there are bicycles for rent. However, we didn't see that many people riding them. It was nothing like what we've seen in European cities, for example.

We liked their crossing signs, which showed us how many seconds we had to cross the street:

We were super impressed with the greenery hanging from the roof of this building--until we realized it was plastic.

There were also several of these funky hanging . . . somethings:

More plastic flora:

We saw several signs like this one, encouraging positive attitudes (in English?!) that appeared to be part of an "attitude campaign" going on here. It felt like propaganda to us, but it is not that different than many of our American billboards encouraging positive values:

When we walked past the upper end of this escalator, again ornately decorated with plastic flowers, we couldn't resist hopping on to see where it would take us:

At the bottom was what looked like very exclusive shopping, some of it still under construction:

A barber and an eyelash salon--a natural combination, right?

There is lots of interesting Chinese architecture, but we needed more time to explore than we had:

Even Starbucks has a Chinese pagoda look:

This Transformer dude is HUGE. He stands in front of the Saluzi Robot Experience Center:

Irishman James Joyce, one of the most influential writers of the 20th century, has made it to Xi'an:

We returned to our hotel to join our group on a trip to the Tang Dynasty "Palace" (a theater) for a dinner show. The theater seats about 650 people, but we had the prime seats in the front AND this nice sign projected onto a screen, one of many such signs that we would see in China. Apparently the owner of FFL has a powerful Chinese friend who makes sure that FFL tourists are treated very well:

We began with a six-course meal that was okay, but not fabulous:

While we ate, we had lovely music provided by seven women with the longest false eyelashes I have ever seen:

After dinner we watched a music and dance show accompanied by a live traditional Chinese orchestra:

This is the description of the show that was provided in the program:

"The story is based on the life of the famous historical figure in China: Empress Wu Ze-tianof the Tang Dynasty (618-907 CE). Empress Wu was born in 624 CE and became a concubine of the Tang Emperor when she was only 14 years old. Years of living in the palace had made her tough and smart, growing up from a simple and innocent young girl into a hardened and sophisticated court politics player. With her wisdom, talents and persistence, she managed to become the first wife of the emperor soon and in 690 CE eventually ascended the throne to be the empress in her own right after her husband died.

It's a good thing we had this little blurb because I would have had no idea what was going on in the play. Even with this, actually, I had no idea what was going on. It would have been helpful to have a brief synopsis of each of the five scenes.

However, even though I was clueless, the costumes and dancing were very entertaining.

Check out the stilt shoes:

The show ended with a very cool dragon dance:

We loved Xi'an, and if we ever go back, we'd like to get a local guide to take us to places the locals frequent but that the tourists don't. Don't get me wrong--all of the places we did visit were full of Chinese tourists, but we feel like there is a lot more to see outside of the tourist areas where we spent most of our time.

AFTERTHOUGHT:
We had one really unique experience in Xi'an. We rode down the elevator with a European man who lives in China with whom we struck up a conversation. He told us there was a big crackdown on communications at that moment. There was a national summit coming up in Beijing, and the government was stifling any perceived protest or anti-government action. He says in the last 20 years that he has lived in China, government repression has become much worse.  He expressed more confidence in America's system of checks and balances than we currently feel under the Trump presidency. (I'm always amazed at how much Europeans know about American politics and how little we know--or care--about theirs.)

We came home to read the stories of the Nineteenth Party Congress in which President Xi Jinping amassed incredible political power many believe to be equal to that exercised by Mao. His name and his political ideology have been ensconced in the Communist Party Constitution, and recent trends toward shared leadership have been completely reversed.

I've followed the news stories with great interest. Travel makes everything more real, more relevant, and yes, a little bit scary.