In the morning we rose and went to the office to get our key deposit back and I decided to join in the penny pinching by selling the book back to the hostel. They had charged fifty yuan for a book that I am sure was left behind by another guest so I made them give me twenty for it. It was a first for the staff and I enjoyed doing it!
I would not recommend this guesthouse. There is no common room for the normal hostel conviviality, no laundry or coffee shop on the premises other than the hotel one which emanates an unspoken message that it is for Hotel Guests. The staff are tense when the manager is there and friendly and relaxed when he is not. There are also mosquitoes in the rooms and the plumbing smells. You and the hostel manager will have to work out which one I am talking about. I hope he can return to the approach that earned him good comment in The Lonely Planet. If not, I hope they delete their recommendation.
The flight to Xi’an was uneventful and I chatted with the young Chinese man I sat next to. He is studying astronomy in the US and until now has had to leave the States every six months to renew his visa, a harsh financial requirement for a citizen of a country which is just emerging from third world economics. He told me that requirement is now revoked and he should be able to stay a year without leaving again.
I had booked into a Hostel next to the old wall and the bus took us to within walking distance of it. It is the place I stayed in during my first Spring Festival (2004) and was the place I was first inspired to study Chinese. Unexpectedly we were offered cheaper accommodation when we got off the bus and I decided to follow up on that. Eventually we took a hotel room in the centre of town, near the Drum Tower, at half their normal price but the same as the hostel. I felt a little bad but the hostel competes in the same way at the railway station. An unexpected additional cost at the hotel was the laundry. At the hostel I could have done my own but at the hotel we had to pay and the price was high.
Once we had settled into the Hotel we headed for the lane leading to the Mosque. There is an archway near the Drum Tower. We went through there and took the first left into a narrow lane of shops. This lane takes an arched course past the Mosque and at the other end you can turn right and, soon after, right again and be on the street leading back to the Drum Tower. The Great Mosque in Xi’an is the oldest in China and is proclaimed as the biggest, but I suspect there are bigger in Xinjiang, which is the predominantly Islamic province in China’s North-west. The little shops and market stalls sell lacquer boxes, paintings, silk scarves, metalware, carved wood, jewellery, fake brand-name purses, papercuts (sounds terrible but they are beautiful pictures made by cutting paper), shadow puppets, ceramic tiles, t-shirts, postcards and , of course, fake terracotta warriors, chariots, and related stuff. So far it is my favourite market for fakes in China. The fakes are a lot cheaper here than the ones in the museums, which charge exorbitant prices or the official fakes at the Terracotta Warriors site. We enjoyed our visit here and bought some nice paintings on silk for presents. The vendors were friendly and one reduced her prices by half immediately when she found I was teaching in China. SG bought a bracelet and necklace. She was really impressed by some fake (ahem!) purses and bought one with impressive intials. I saw some nice small carved wood objects that I would love to buy one day.