Xi'an: Day 3 (11/23/19)
My new friend James and I agreed yesterday to meet up this morning for a tour around town. We had a little trouble getting out phones to communicate though since I never got my WeChat working since Changdu, so it took a little finagling to find each other. But finally spotted one another after a half hour of running in circles and James introduced me to Wan Kai Na. (Full name? Nickname? Surname first or second? Spelled right? I dunno.) She was another Xi’an local and long time friend of James’, and would be joining us on our adventure around town!
James led the three of us over to a breakfast stall that served what I would call hot cereal. Some sort of warm milk filled with granola, seeds, and dried fruit. It kind of reminded me of breakfast in Nepal, just with granola instead of a pancake. Also in a cup so we could walk, talk, and eat on the go. James still insisted on paying for everything which I was very thankful for. I’m sure my pauper’s budget wouldn’t have allowed me to gorge as much as I did.
At first I thought Wan Kai Na was super shy because she didn’t really talk, much but according to James she was just embarrassed about her English skills. She seemed to have no issue following along with our conversation though and when I asked questions it seemed like her vocabulary was really good. By the end of breakfast I had learned she was a school teacher and also a fanatic for spicy food. Apparently part of the deal for her coming today was the guarantee that she got to choose where we ate, getting us museum tickets, and seeing when I would crack from spice. (I was not aware of the two latter parts of the deal until later, but more on those when they happen.)
On our walk we passed through an open air meat market and a game of “name-that-meat” started up. I did pretty well with cow parts like heart and lungs but was totally lost when it came to anything from the sea. It was definitely a different experience from an American supermarket where everything is sterile and refrigerated. Here, it wasn’t uncommon to see meat tied on the back of a moped and driven through the dusty alleys. I asked if buying meat here had a health concern and James gave me a half answer that I interpreted as ‘sometimes, but that’s just life’.
The three of us walked and talked our way several blocks to the old city wall, which reminded me a lot of old town Nuremburg. Different though is that apparently you can ride a bike along the entire thing which sounded awesome! We had plans for all of today, but James said that he would take me tomorrow - my man!
After about an hour of walking we stepped into a noodle shop for lunch where Wan Kai Na taught me how to say please, thank you, and a few other small phrases. I like to practice so by the bottom of our bowls we had a little routine of saying please and thank you for every little thing. It was like grade school all over again! James and I also had a bit where he would say something in Mandarin, look to me like it was a question, and I would reply with an enthusiastic “yea!”. Even if Wan Kai Na didn’t tell me it wasn’t nice, I totally knew he used it a few times to make fun of me. I was honestly fine with it though, since it seemed like it was all in good fun.
After lunch (a delicious pho-like soup with light broth and chunks of meat) we rented bikes from an automated rack. Apparently they’re super cheap and a lot of people use them daily. Plus, it’s super easy since you can just swipe your phone and you’re good to go. Not me though, since I never got WeChat working. It seems like a lot of China is swipeable, including most stores and restaurants, which I gotta say makes me feel like the country is living in the future in that regard.
I really enjoyed our ride through the city. At stoplights James would tell me about the city: hidden underground mall entrances, a 6th floor restaurant with glass floors, or his favorite cars. Turns out James is a car fanatic by the way. Our ride came to an end around 3pm when we arrived at the day’s primary destination - the Shaanxi History Museum. (Chanting can be heard in the distance. '“Museum rat museum rat museum rat.”)
Now a little known fact about the Shaanxi History Museum is that it only has so many tourist passes available per day, and they get sold out almost immediately early every morning. However, locals don’t have the same limitation, and educators get in for a discounted rate. So by including a single student of Wan Kai Na’s, they were able to smuggle me into an exclusive museum I never would have had a chance to see on my own under the pretext of education. Hell yea! All I had to do was listen to the high school student’s local history paper in English, which she was suuuuper embarrassed to give even though her English really was quite good. I think she was massively relieved that I had nothing but compliments for her.
The museum itself covered the region’s history from approximately 300,000 years ago through the Tang dynasty (900 A.D.), and really impressed me with its collection. I think the most famous artifact I saw was the Dali Man, an fossilized early Homo sapien skull dated from 200,000 - 300,000 years ago. There was a great deal of pottery and other functional art like bells and tomb decor. (I consider tomb stuff to be functional art since, like most civilizations at that time, death was considered to be a continuation of life and the items entombed with the dead would be brought with them to the afterlife. There, I’ve done my due diligence for my Art History 101 professor.) Honestly, I think my favorite exhibit was ancient economy section, where it focused on currency and figurine art, so the hall was packed with hundreds of little pottery dudes and animals that people in cities were buying at the time.
After a solid two hours of museum crawling we were all feeling brain flooded and went in search of somewhere to chill for a bit. On the way, James bought a small container of a pale yellow semi-tough fruit that was really tasty. He described it as a common snack after eating spicy food and at first I thought it was jackfruit, until I spotted an opened durian next door and its innards looked identical. Surprise - It’s your first durian! Actually way more tasty then I thought.
Shortly after, we entered one of the nearby megabuildings and I was shocked to see it was all a single mall! Not nearly as large as the Dubai Mall in terms of floor space,but it was still enormous due to the sheer height. I mean, it must have been ten or twelve stories tall, with a three story tall waterfall marking out the central space. That wasn’t the mall’s claim to fame though. That would be, according to James, the longest escalator in Asia, at six stories tall. And that still only took you up like halfway!
We toured around for a bit, window shopping at cute bakeries or fashion centers, before settling down at a tea shop. I honestly have no clue what I ordered. All I know is that it was boba and had a slightly bitter + sweet thing going on. Generally not my favorite, but not bad either. While sipping away James and Wan Kai Na got into a heated debate in Mandarin, I think over where happiness comes from in life or something of that ilk, and the two of them expertly distracted me with an iPod full of currently popular songs in China. It was pretty obvious that they wanted some uninterrupted time to hash out the meaning of life, which I didn’t mind since I was feeling a little overstimulated myself (I haven’t stuck around the same people for multiple days like this in a while), so I zoned into the music and people-watched the time away.
We hung around sipping tea for a while until we regained out physical and social appetites, then ventured out into the food court floor. This was when I found out about their diabolical plot to destroy me with spicy foods! Oh, the cruelty! The inhumanity! The betrayal! Too bad for them I’m a unconquerable GOD OF SPICE!
Ok but actually, we had a lot of fun doing the spicy food crawl. James would order one dish from each place and then Wan Kai Na and I would share. This generally ended with her laughing and me beet red, sweating, trying to hold back tears. We had just an absurd number of dishes but three in particular will never leave my mind for the amount of pain they inflicted on me: red soup tofu, black tofu, and grilled cold noodles.
I have no clue what the red soup tofu was actually called, but it was tofu in a red soup so that’s what we’re gonna call it. It was like eating a raw serrano pepper dunked in chili oil. My tongue hurt, my throat burned, my nose ran, and the two of us ate the whole bowl in under a minute. It sticks in my mind because of how unprepared I was for the first bite. James warned me it was spicy and shared a knowing glace with Wan Kai Na so I suspected it was gonna be hot, but I didn’t expect it to hit me like a brick wall at mach 5. Wan Kai Na was absolutely dying with laughter while I was melting from the inside out.
Black tofu has been immortalized in memory as hands down the spiciest thing I’ve ever eaten. I was in on the ruse now so I gave it a sniff to check how much pain I was in for. One sniff sent me into a coughing fit and I had to had the dish over to Wan Kai Na to hold while I regained my composure. Once able to breathe again we split one piece 3 ways and counted down. I would have loved to be a passerby at that moment. Seeing three people simultaneously shaking their hands out, jumping up and down in circles, keeling over into a pained squat, and making little squeals of torment. It would have made my day. Instead, we had to live it, which was much less fun. It’s a good memory now though, one of shared hardship and vulnerability, where we supported each other through tough times and came out stronger for it. (Queue flashback to, like, digging a hole together under the beating sun or something.)
The last dish I remember for its story. James had a long conversation with the workers and a whole group came out to witness me. Apparently, James had convinced the shop owner to give us free food in exchange for recording me try his hottest dish - cold grilled noodles. I’d never had a cold noodle dish before but I thought it played really nice with the flavors and spice. The texture was all glass noodles with a lot of flavor from egg, cabbage, onion, and a savory sauce. A 10/10 food that I could eat a whole meal of no questions asked. Now I’m not gonna say the spice level wasn’t high, but it wasn’t as bad as either of the earlier tofu’s. It still left me red faced and sweating though. So if you’re even in a Xi’an mall and see a noodle stall advertising with a video of a flushed, red-headed white boy giving a thumbs up with his mouth full, you’ll know who it is.
We rounded off the night outside sharing a hot bowl of clam soup, Wan Kai Na’s favorite food, chatting about life and our philosophies. The two of them still had many questions about life in America and whether things they had seen in Hollywood films were true. I assured them that yes, you do sometimes see people walking around in cowboy hats and no, its not ironic. Around 10pm we packed it up and they escorted me back to my subway stop, with promises to hang out again tomorrow and bike around on the old city wall!
