Flying to Xi'an

After a few days of vomiting and having a fever I finally have the power to write again. I kind of forgot how shitty you can feel while you’re sick, fortunately I haven’t been really sick in Arnhem before so I haven’t experienced sickness without someone there to make you a bowl of soup and make you some fruit juice! Well, as you can guess… now I know. Last Sunday I had been working on the DVD project for at least 14 hours in a row which kind of screw up my sleeping rhythm. So when I woke up the following morning I instantly started to vomit. Not real nice start of the day, so I called in sick and I tried to catch up my sleep (34 hours of sleep, I woke up a few times of course!). I won’t bore you with the details of my exciting 34 hours of sleep stories.. since I got soooo much work done during those two days. :/ But instead I give you some interesting stories about Xi’an!

Before I start my story about Xi’an I’ll give you the heads up on my biggest problem the last few weeks… my pc was broken. But I finally got it back! ASUS repaired it for free since I still had 1 month of warranty left! That means I already have this pc for two full years now. Perhaps it is time to look for a new model.. as the “ mobile i7 quad cores” are about to hit the market in two weeks. But let’s first try to survive China financially since the trip wasn’t exactly cheap… and missing a flight doesn’t really help to reduce the costs.

As most of you guys now know Moniek visited me here in Xiamen. Xiamen is a great city if you want to flee your everyday work schedule and go on a vacation, but if you really want to see the real Chinese life… Xiamen just isn’t the place to be. It is more like a vacation resort you can escape to for two nice weeks (guess that’s the reason that this internship still feels like a nice flee from The Netherlands). Moniek came to China to have a nice vacation but also to see the real Eastern culture, therefore we decided to escape Xiamen and head out for Xi’an (and that was an affordable trip). Xi’an was also a good choice because it is very special for the Chinese, as a good Chinese friend of mine told me. It contains a lot of the Chinese history and therefore all Chinese are supposed to visit Xi’an once in their life. So Moniek and I took the cab towards the airport at 9 am and booked two round-trip ticket to Xi’an for 220 euro’s pp. Our plane would leave in the evening around 9 o’clock so we had 12 hours to prepare. I had to go to work to make sure the Chinese guys and girls of the design team had something to do for a week and Moniek offered to structure the bag packing ( as I mentioned before, she is a natural after all).

After a three hours flight we arrived at Xi’an in the night which wasn’t a big pleasure to be honest. We arrived and got in to a cab, after calling the hostel who explained the location we headed out to city center. We thought it would be a short drive as we didn’t expected Xi’an airport to be far from Xi’an itself. The cab driver offered us the trip for 100 Yuan in advantages or he could turn on the meter as usual he said. Well, since all my cab rides here in Xiamen haven’t been above the 50 Yuan… we told him to turn on the meter. After a ride of 45 minutes in a strange city with a crappy cab ride which cost us 170 Yuan.. we arrived in a city that looked dark and empty and definitely not like a amazing city Xi’an we expected. But we were in the right place as the cab driver showed us our hostel, after checking in we found our room which was basic and cold. But since we were both really tired, we simply didn’t complain and went straight to bed. (one good thing, the bed was a little bit softer then my bed in Xiamen. Which feels like plain wood!) The following day we walked around the city just to explore as we had slept most of the day. Of course Moniek saw a few stores which sold the most perfect boots she just had to have.. so we could add a new pair shoes to the list. Although I bought a few things as well in Xi’an so it wasn’t just Moniek who brought in the extra luggage at the airport when we headed back to Xiamen. The day after we booked a trip to a panda rescue reservoir. We were taken there by a tour

bus with several other tourist including two from Belgium, so we got to speak a little Dutch in Xi’an. The panda beers were really cute and quite funny to see. The first panda’s we saw were quit… well boring and lazy. They didn’t do much except laying on their back and pouring bamboo down their throat. But later on we were taken towards an area where they were playing around with a child panda and his mother. They were really active and simply running and stumbling around, looked really funny and cute! I will add some pictures so you can see the two panda’s yourself.

At night we visited some dancing show which showed a lot of people playing drum. As Xi’an is famous for its drums.. we had seen quite a few during our “first exploring Xi’an day”. So seeing another show with drums was quite boring to me, but the good wine and the Chinese girls dancing quit made up for the drums. The following day we headed out to a place that is supposed to be one of the world miracles called the Terracota Warrios. If something is called a world miracle, you automatically expect a lot. Which kind of happened to me, and of course high expectations can only result in disappointment. I didn’t found the warriors that impressive, of course it is quite unique to see so many statues of warriors being buried under the ground… but it all felt quite fake a made up to me. I expected it to be something mysterious were we had to go in to a cave to see thousands of warriors stacked up against the wall. But what we got were thousand of warriors all put in order in rows in some sort of gigantic ice skating hall. The ice skating hall kind of screwed my mystic expectations.

The days after the terracotta warriors we enjoyed some clubbing, we visited the drum towers, went to the local Muslim area. (which was really uncomfortable as they will grasp you arms to sell you stuff), climbed the mountains and drove over the Xi’an city wall bye bike and of course we did some more shopping. Xi’an was definitely a gorgeous City although I was happy to go back to Xiamen after a week. In my opinion the people in Xi’an were ruder then the people in Xiamen. People in Xiamen (almost) always smile at you and are nice and don’t try to screw you with everything just to make some extra profit. You feel kind of accepted, when you are in Xi’an which is more touristic, people will always try to make profit of you.

The cabs were more expensive, the food was more expensive and if every single store you had to try to get the price lower. Kind of annoying if you ask me! But if I have to believe Moniek… it was simply because they idealize Western people less. According to her it had something to do with me ego (I kindly disagreed with her of course, luckily she was getting pissed at some Xi’an people as well. That was my prove it wasn’t just me!) We had booked a flight which was scheduled to leave at 8:40 in the morning, so we went to bed early and planned to woke up around half pas 5. Well, something went wrong with my alarm on my phone (got to love windows mobile right? I am starting to hate the shity piece of software!) so we woke up around 7 o’clock! So we ran down and ordered a cab and of course we got the only female cab driver which really followed the traffic rules. So she wasn’t driving as a fast maniac and we ended up 7 minutes to late for the check-in! We had to wait at the airport for an extra 12 hours with a single way ticket which was just as expensive as our initial round-way trip ticket. I even put up my nicest smile to the lady behind the counter but unfortunately I couldn’t get a discount! As you may understand.. I am currently counting the days until the “stufie” arrives again.

It is time for me to go back to work as our new CEO has arrived two days ago. Since I have been sick for two days I haven’t been able to meet him yet. And being sick for two days isn’t the best introduction as you can imagine. So ill head-out for work and will write a new blog in a few days. By the way, thanks for the responses! Really enjoy every single one of them. Feedback is always welcome!

Hugs and kisses,

Frenkie

(Written on Wednesday 11 of November 2009, at 03:35 am)