Jan. 16

Today we head to Xi'an!

I fell asleep on the plane multiple times and somehow it was the most comfortable sleep I've ever had on a plane. Maybe I was more tired than I thought.

Upon arrival, Xi'an looks like a bomb went off, like the aftermath of an apocalypse.
The air looks like a huge cloud of dust, or a blanket of it. It's as if upon arrival, we all climbed under this wool blanket that the sun barely shines through. I can stare straight into the sun. The pollution is terrible, the river is mucky. History was born here, industry has infected its life, paralyzed its resources, brought the threat of an early death to beautiful promise. Yet, there's something tranquil. I can't describe it really. Like, maybe the blanket is smothering me but protecting me too. The trees shrug, limp, heavy. I could see myself inspired here. Perhaps honing my ability to appreciate the beauty - to see and seek it in everything, even the abandoned.

We went to a city wall of Xi'an. It had nice views, but it looked a bit commercialized with tons of these huge, colorful lantern sculptures.


It wasn't until a bit later that I realized it wasn't commercialized - it was all decorations for the upcoming Spring Festival (Chinese New Year) that is like the biggest holiday known to China. It was nice to walk around, but part of our class got lost biking along the wall, so we were really late to dinner.

Dinner was an entirely different and awkward story. We only had planned a lunch budget for dinner, so we got pretty much all vegetable side dishes, with rarely any meat. There were TONS of onions. So many onions. Onions, onions, onions. Then, our tour guide, randomly started performing salsa dancing in the restaurant. It was almost as bizarre as the time that we were on the bus and he asked if we liked Elvis, and then promptly started serenading us. Actually, that happened about 10 minutes after the salsa dancing, now that I think about it.

The hotel room is really, really nice. It is decorated with lots of white, light aqua blue, and mirrors.
At night, some of us decided to roam the city. We found all these street vendors that cooked things in places my parents would never approve of. Some man cooked skewers of meal on thin metal rods. However, we weren't allowed to take the metal skewers, ,so we had to eat them in a weird huddle in the middle of the street, returning the skewers in a pile on the sidewalk after we had finished. I don't think he washes the skewers between servings. There were also these delicious, fat noodles filled with all sorts of spices and sauces. They were cooked in a large saucepan that was heated over a rusty metal trashcan, filled with coal and a hole in the side that let out bursts of fire every so often. If you stood too close, you could easily get burned without warning. The noodles were served by being poured into a small, plastic bag. It was really ghetto.

There were also these tasty baozi, or buns filled with meat and vegetables.

Something I've noticed: The people in Xi'an stare at us a lot more than the people in Beijing. It's kind of cool. There's something warm about this city that I really love. I don't really know what, though. I just know that sometimes it makes me a lot more inspired to write than any other place I've been thus far.