Making history
For a place that’s regarded as the “ancient city,” I think we had a lot more than we we expected. The same day after our tea house experience, we visited a stone tablet museum which had carvings of traditional Chinese characters and workers stamping away at the stones to get copies of it to sell. Tony said it takes skill and time to get these stamps done — especially the peeling process because the paper is extremely thin and you don’t want to rip it. To complete this, workers peel part of the parchment off the tablets, give it some time to dry then peel a little more. So it was with no wonder why it costs 400 CNY ($58.87 USD) to purchase a roll of this print.
Yet what fascinated me the most wasn’t exactly the characters getting pounded onto thin little papers, it was the side of the tablets that caught my attention. Along the side were incredible swirl designs similar to damask, aka pretty trendy right now. I might come off as a bit ignorant(?) but really, they just don’t look traditionally Chinese at all. And these tablets are hundreds, if not, centuries, of years old. How crazy is it that they had designs that look like what we still like today?
Outside the museum was surrounded by art. Everything was peaceful and quiet, every step to take was met with rustling sound of the grass, concrete and wind.
Later that day as the sun began to set, a crowd formed around the garden area. Everyone pointed to the sky and started to take photos: apparently a solar eclipse was happening. I don’t know a lot about astronomy so I’m not sure how rare or often this happens, and unfortunately my camera was not powerful enough to capture it. Hopefully I can steal a photo from someone who did manage to photograph the crescent. For whatever reason, the Chinese see this as the “dragon taking a bite out of the sun”. I just think it’s pretty cool.
The next day we went to the city wall that surrounded the “metropolitan” section of Xi’an. At the top, we were allowed to pay 20 CNY to rent a bicycle to ride on top of the wall, four sides equalling to 12 miles. Also, we were given a time limit of one hour to spend. As my American side comes out (a.k.a I’m not exactly fit) I decided I’ll take a try for one wall and be happy with going for three miles. I’m just not a great exerciser anyhow, but I did miss riding bicycles.
Obviously, I couldn’t take photos of myself, but my camera apparently subconsciously tried to. The result is a total fail. I made it to one wall, took a pit stop to take photos and rode back, making it six miles of riding. For that, I’m proud of myself. Who else will be able to go around this summer (besides the kids in the program) saying that they rode on top of the Xi’an city wall in their January? Simply put: I still win. Don’t make fun of me, I just don’t work out, okay!
