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The heat of summer in China had exhausted us both so we did not have as much energy as we would have liked in Suzhou, but while we were there we went to a couple of nice places. One tourist thing we didn’t end up doing was a canal boat trip. I wanted to but baulked when the proprietor wanted us to pay three times the price written on his noticeboard.

Bei Si Ta is a nine-storey pagoda that is a prominent landmark in the town. We climbed it as far as was allowed and viewed the standard view of a grubby modern industrial city. However it had character and although the niches that once held images of Buddhas were empty it was genuinely old and not spoiled by over restoration. I must qualify that, however, as it does need more protection and sensitive restoration work. The paintwork is so scratched by graffiti that it will be no trouble to remove what remains. There is a solitary Buddha statue on the ground floor.

In the courtyard is a wonderful fat Buddha, albeit a modern one, so full of character one can’t help laughing at it. My daughter had her portrait done by a young artist nearby. He didn’t do a bad job, though not quite as accurate as he might have been, drawing a Chinese person.

After Bei Si Ta we went to the Garden of the Master of the Nets, which I determined to visit when I learned there is a copy of one of its areas in the Metropolitan museum of Art in New York. It was worth visiting Suzhou for. I had an immediate sense of peace as I entered and the artistry of its design calmed my soul as only the highest art can. It is beautiful, there is no more to say except that I applaud its acceptance on the World Heritage list.

On the morning of my girl’s departure we went to the train station. It was a very hot day and the station was crowded. For the first time in China no-one came forward to offer any help in finding the right place to buy a ticket. After a while we found the ticket hall and when I saw the throngs waiting there I decided to check the Lonely Planet Guide again. There was an address for a travel service so we took a taxi there and I bought two tickets for an afternoon train.

Then we found a restaurant to escape from the heat but neither of us felt like eating. We only bought two cans of soft drink but here is an example of the excellence of service in eating places in China. The waitresses saw how hot and weary we were (I was dripping with sweat when we arrived) and plied us with plates of watermelon free of charge. There may be no place in the world that can match the welcome and service in Chinese restaurants.

Our train to Shanghai was modern and fast and at the station there we found a friendly and honest lady taxi driver who charged us the right fare. I chatted to her in simple Chinese about Shining girl going back to Australia and me going back to Wuhan and she made a phone enquiry about the time of a flight that night. It was too early, only a short time after SG’s flight left and from Hong Qiao airport, so I thanked her and said I wouldn’t take it but would see my daughter off. When we stopped at the airport this kind driver sent me off to get a trolley before getting our bags out and told me where to get a cheap bus back into Shanghai later.

When we arrived and joined the check-in queue an Australian woman travelling with two young children told us the plane would be two hours late. We soon found that it was only a one hour delay but the staff were in no hurry to process people through quickly. We waited a couple of hours before getting to the counter. The Australian woman’s husband was a businessman working in Shanghai. She was good company and a young Australian man joined in the conversation. He had come for a three week tour. We shared some of our different experiences of China.

The queue started to move faster as departure time approached and Shining girl and I had time to go for a last snack together. We were quite sad as we waited. She had exercised her right to vent and tell me to come home, earlier in the day, but the anger was over and she just urged me to come for a visit as soon as I could. Then it was time for her to go to the Exit Lounge and I watched her walk through the gates and out of sight.

I found the right bus and went to Shanghai station. There were crowds everywhere as usual but I was relieved to spot a ticket window labelled ‘Foreign Visitors’ and was soon asking for a ticket to Wuhan ‘mashang’ (immediately). To my chagrin there was no train until 2.00p.m. next day. I had hoped Wuhan was a big enough place to have a frequent train service from Shanghai. It seems 9 million is not enough!

By then had a physical reaction, perhaps to Shining girl going home. I felt exhausted and was almost staggering. I still had the number of East China University in my phone and rang them. There was no problem with a bed and I tried to get a taxi. The first two I approached refused to take me there as they didn’t know where it was. This was after I got them to speak to the receptionist on the mobile phone. I walked wearily up the road to a main street and hailed another cab. This time I got in and told the driver to head for Hong Qiao airport while I looked up my Guide. I was working on the plan that if he had me in his cab already and had gone some distance he would not want to waste the time by asking me to get out again. He was unable to work out where I wanted to go from the details in my book so I rang the receptionist again and this time the driver understood the directions and soon had me there.

I walked through the grounds on a hot Shanghai evening and arrived sweating at my destination. There was no trouble and I went to the room, unloaded my stuff and went down and bought a snack at the shop on the ground floor. I ate it and collapsed into bed.

Next day I consulted the wonderful woman who is my mentor and supporter in any difficulties I have in China (and was then my work supervisor) about getting back to Wuhan and went to the airport and bought a ticket for the first afternoon flight and went home to Wonderland. Seriously, that is the translation of the name of the estate I was staying in at the time.

We were going to Suzhou by train on Thursday night so we spent the morning repacking and headed out again. Shining girl had spotted another market that looked interesting so we left our luggage with the Hostel staff and took another cab. It looked new, and had a higher standard of goods than Xiushui but I didn’t note the name down. It’s near the Workers’ Stadium. At the top there were beauty services and SG decided she could afford to have gel nails added to her fingers. I noticed they also did massage so I sat in the next chair and had a lovely time with a strong Chinese woman who massaged my neck, back and hands.

The train was clean and comfortable and smoking was not allowed so we had a restful overnight trip to Suzhou. I had rung the Suzhou International Youth Hostel and booked a room with two beds and bathroom so we took a cab there, hailing one to avoid the inflated prices in the rank by the station. The girl on reception seemed hardly out of High School and her English was extremely limited. She had no knowledge of our booking and I asked for one room, two beds and w.c. I began to have doubts when she handed us two keys and charged less than I expected but when I tried English and Chinese she assured me it was ok. We took the lift to the fourth floor and climbed to the fifth where we found adjoining rooms, hoping there would be a door between the two. When we opened the doors we found six-person bunk rooms.

I told SG to wait with the bags while I returned to reception to try to sort it all out. Another staff member was at Reception too but neither was competent to deal with foreign customers. Finally another guest offered to help, a woman who works for Bosch China and was in Suzhou for training. She interpreted my request in Chinese (she was Chinese) and the still puzzled looking young thing pointed to a noticeboard where there were five room options including one that said in English, ‘private room, two beds, w.c. (w.c.? This is a term most Westerners don’t use but every Chinese student of English uses it. Where did it come into the curriculum from? Do you use it?)’ and asked which one I wanted. Of course I told her yet again and she asked me to pay the additional money to ‘change’. Then she discovered the note about my original booking and apologized! One of the marvellous things about China is that there is always someone nearby who has a reasonable command of English and is really happy to help.

I went upstairs and collected my daughter then descended two floors to our room. In the room was a Visitor’s Guide which set out the Hostel’s services in an attempt at English which was as completely unintelligible an example of Chinglish as I have yet come across. What was most amusing was their way of discouraging patrons from stealing stuff from the room. They had a price list for everything from the face washer to the television set!

Our experience of Suzhou was that it is not very foreigner-friendly. It is a popular destination for Chinese and less well-known to foreign visitors. We found almost no one who spoke any English. It didn’t matter, except at the Hostel. I got along ok with my smattering of Putonghua and the Guide book and a good local map with English.

Suzhou is ruled by the bicycle. China as a whole takes, ‘I Did it My Way’ as its theme song for road users but the cyclists of Suzhou ride as if they are super villains in an Anime cartoon. They have one purpose, to get to their destination, and they will stop for nothing or no-one. I watched one young lady on an electric bike shoot across the path of our taxi with inches to spare looking neither right nor left as though she were catatonic. Her course was then parallel to ours for a time and I followed her with appalled eyes as she ignored every rule of law and courtesy and every vehicle and pedestrian, never shifting her gaze from the few meters directly in front of her electric bike, daring the Heavens to send something capable of stopping her. Soon after I came to China a pupil asked me the strange question, ‘Do you believe in the magical powers of the Chinese people?’ I was already able to reply to that. I said, ‘Yes. Every time I go in a car in China I believe in the magical powers of the Chinese people. They are the only thing that prevents accidents.’

We went to eat at a dumpling restaurant recommended by the Lonely Planet and walked along to a market area which filled the precincts of a Confucian Temple.

On Monday we were not particularly active. My illness was under control but Shining girl had been sick in the night and it was her turn to sleep all day. I went to the bank and spent a long time in the business of persuading them to give me the money I had waited for so long. That’s a saga in itself.

Afterwards I walked down to the Xiushui market and ran the gauntlet of insistent vendors to buy a nice Columbia lightweight shirt, or reasonable facsimile thereof. I went back to the hostel to check on SG then went looking for somewhere to buy medicine. My first stop was at the Pacific Centre, a nearby department store, and to my surprise I discovered a supermarket as well. This is a place I went to numerous times during my previous visit to Beijing but had never discovered that in the basement at the left-hand area there is a supermarket that caters well to Western tastes. I bought yoghurt, good bread, fruit, Evian Water…. And carried it all back to SG, who proceeded to devour a long French loaf.

The next day we went to The Forbidden City. We entered from the back and walked through to Tian an Men. It was crowded with bus loads of people and the day was hot. Many of the buildings were shrouded under cloth for restoration and I had the thought that we should have been charged only half price as we could only see half of it. I took some photos but my main subject was my lovely daughter. Somehow the fast buck side of Beijing clouded my experience of Beijing this time and I couldn’t make my self shake the mood off enough to enjoy what could be seen. SG does not know enough history yet to fully appreciate the Palace but enjoyed it nevertheless. Weather and the tide of people who flooded Zi Jin Cheng took the edge off its beauty and left us without that sense of awe I had in winter, when fewer people were around.

Knowing what really interested her I suggested we could go to another market, Hong Qiao, so we took a cab there. She was in her element and we made a good deal on an iPod. A nice young fellow let us bargain him down but he didn’t have the colour SG wanted. He would get a messenger to bring it in ten minutes he told us. More than half an hour later we were still waiting and SG went off to see if she could get what she wanted at another stall. She came back and said she had succeeded and the stallholder was still saying ten minutes. I gave him five minutes to have it. Five minutes later we went and bought it from the other shop.

We had heard from other travellers that both the Summer Palace and the Temple of Heaven were covered in scaffolding and SG was dying to go back to Xiushui Market, so we decided that the heat was too much for us and we would shop instead of seeing the sights. Our first stop was for me. I wanted to go to the Foreign Language Bookstore and buy some more Chinese language learning materials so we went off to Wangfujing Street and I bought more materials for studying Chinese and had them mailed to Wuhan.

Then we went for a shopping marathon to Xiushui Silk Street. I participated and found a few more nice things for my home and as presents to be taken back to Australia. SG bought more clothes. She had become more aware of what kind of designs would suit her. We also bought her another small suitcase so she could get her Chinese treasures and the gifts we had both bought for family back to Australia. We dropped our shopping bags at the hostel before going out again.

As we walked around the outside of the Zhaolong Hotel building from our hostel we had what was for me perhaps the most thrilling moment of our trip. We saw a small animal on a piece of lawn. I had caught a glimpse of something running quickly across my path and into some shrubbery on my winter visit but couldn’t identify it. This time it stopped and I looked at it and it looked at me. It was a small red coated animal like a weasel, stoat, ferret, or mink or marten - that family anyway. It was living and foraging at the base of a five-star hotel in the centre of Beijing. Amazing!

We took a cab to The Big Easy, the New Orleans restaurant and live jazz venue I discovered before. It was great again and a big black American woman sang while a Chinese jazzman identifiable by a little moustache and tiny goatee played the piano very well. The Big Easy provides drawing paper as a tablecloth and wax crayons to draw with so we had fun drawing pictures of each other and playing squiggle.

On Saturday we rested in the morning. I have decided that anyone who writes about travelling as if it is easy going must be very young, and/or very fit. I am neither and SG was tired a lot too. Come to think of it BMW was too when we went to Beijing in winter. We had a look at Xiu Shui market and bought a little. Shining girl liked it and wanted to go again. I found it very tiring.

In the evening my friend Margo (name changed) came to the hotel for us and took us to a one-hundred and forty year old Beijing Duck Restaurant, where we were served a beautifully cooked duck and given a certificate telling us the number of the duck. They have kept a record of every duck they have served since opening. Ellen now has the card and it was 1.15 million and a few score thousand. A nice experience in good company. Margo paid with characteristic Chinese generosity and insistence even though I protested that I had invited her. (See, I don’t only note the negatives in Chinese behaviour.) She offered to take us to the Great Wall the next day and had already arranged a driver. I met Margo at work where she came as a translator. We have a common interest in writing poetry.

I had a little gastric problem which I was treating with medicine and hoped I would make it to the Wall but in the morning realized I ought not to risk it. I had heard too many stories of people having to hang their private parts over the edge of the edifice in emergencies and it seemed that I would receive several urgent SMSs from Nature during the day. I rang Margo who was happy to take Ellen anyway. The two of them had a good day together and Margo even succeeded in getting Ellen to eat food I would never have got her to try. My daughter is a mannerly young lady. Margo’s generosity continued and I must find a way to do something nice for her in Wuhan.

I slept most of the day and was a little concerned about the next, as that was the day we were going to Tianjin to see BMW.

I was fine in the morning and we got to the station in plenty of time to take a train to Tianjin. As we were walking along the platform towards the exit BMW rang to say she had finished her exam and was on the bus coming to town. Good timing. I located the Goubuli dumpling restaurant where we were to meet and sat there with SG for about fifteen minutes before a sparklingly excited BMW arrived. The girls warmly accepted each other immediately and spent the rest of the day hand-in-hand as ’sisters’ ought.

We went to BMW’s university and ate at a Coffee Shop that has recently opened there. Students can work in it to get experience with English. There is a lot of non-Chinese food on the menu and overseas staff and students often eat there. BMW goes with foreign friends.

All of us needed food and were refreshed after the meal. I wanted to go to a street in Tianjin that had antique shops and stalls so that’s where we went. Many were fake - Victrola gramophones with shiny labels, Art Deco lamps the same in two shops. I did see some interesting things there which appeared authentic and I wouldn’t mind spending more time there if I get the chance one day. It would be necessary to browse around for a while, maybe one or two visits, asking prices and comparing things before buying. And, what the heck, some of the fakes are good enough to buy. Who can afford to buy real antiques anyway and what’s the guarantee they are really real?

I hoped that there would be a train back to Beijing in the late evening as BMW could have spared that amount of time but the last train was at half past five and that was the one we had to take. I felt quite sad leaving BMW, conscious of the heavy load she was bearing. She was studying till one every night and rising again at six. It showed in her features both as strength and as tiredness. I hoped SG would write to her and they could stay friends independent of me.

A difficult day!

There was an alarm on Shining girl’s new phone and I asked her to use it. We had to get up at six to get a bus to the airport on time. She miffed it and I woke at seven. We rushed to get everything together and hurried downstairs to check out. We soon hailed a taxi and the woman driver seemed pleasant. I was a little concerned when I noticed she hadn’t put her meter on but didn’t have the energy to say anything. When we got to the airport she tried to over charge us, telling us it was less than the cost of the airport bus. When I told her how much we had paid for the bus she reduced it some of the way and I left it at that.

The flight to Beijing was pleasant but the landscape was covered with haze. We landed and headed for the buses near the exit. I asked which one would take us to Beijing Zhan (the central railway station) and we got on. So far so good. I saw the station in the distance and was pleased we had got on the right bus but a moment later it stopped and we were told to get off, about 200 meters down the road from the station and in the midst of a crowd of pedicab drivers in hard-sell mode all offering to take us there for the special price of 100 yuan! That’s about $16.00AU for the distance. I laughed and showed my displeasure in less agreeable ways and went to hail a taxi a couple of times before our pursuing dark angel agreed to my price of 15 yuan. A taxi could have charged us no more than 10 but what the heck. When we got there the pedicab driver tried to get 15 yuan each but I gave him 15 and refused to pay 30, telling him he agreed to 15, not 30. It’s a common trick. He only left when I offered to find a policeman to decide between us.

Then we went into Beijing Central International Youth Hostel. In Xi’an I had an internet conversation with a worker there and asked her to book us a room and gave her the dates. I was a little concerned that she had not replied to my question about prices as I do like to know in advance. At the counter the receptionist denied having any knowledge of a booking, but did say she knew of one letter from me. There were two letters each way. She did have the sort of room I wanted but when I asked the price it was double my budget. My first letter had stated in clear English how much I wanted to pay. Again I stormed out in high dudgeon after offering a few criticisms of their professionalism. We hailed a cab and I asked them to take me to the Zhaolong Fandian youth hostel where I stayed in winter. On the way I rang and asked if they had a room and checked the price. No problem, I was told.

We arrived at the Zhaolong, which is an annex at the back of a five star hotel of the same name and went to reception. I said I had rung and the counter staff told me there were no twin-bed private rooms. I told them I had rung only minutes before and was told there was one available. They said they would put us in shared rooms until tomorrow. I said I didn’t want a shared room. I wanted the room I had been given on the phone a few moments before. Eventually a pleasant man came in and I gathered he was the person I had spoken to on the phone. He assured me he could sort it out but we would have to wait a couple of hours. One of the rooms was soon to be vacant. It took a lot longer as the people in the room didn’t leave until after five, leaving their camera battery charger behind, but we got our room. We were able to leave our things and go out to eat and get money from my bank.

The hostel is friendly and clean. There are a few deficits, as usual, but it is an ok place for a traveller on a small budget. I do think they should have more than one washing machine to serve five floors of guests. The one they have is a front loader. I have experienced the slowness of front loaders before but this one is the slowest. There are a few drying racks in the small laundry room and one dryer which was working this time. Last time it was revolving but not heating. I didn’t use it. Buy fast drying lightweight clothes for travel. They’re the only way to go.

We were picked up at our hotel for another tour and our guide was a pleasant young Chinese man. Foreigners sat together at the back of the mini-bus under his charge. Lumped together were a Thai, a German, a Japanese, and three Australians who all spoke English and little Chinese. The first stop was Famen Si, a temple/museum where some finger bones of Buddha are said to be located. We were told King Asoka, the famous Buddhist ruler, decided to divide the pieces of Gautama’s corpse to be distributed to all the countries which had adopted the faith. I am not sure if this is now a practicing temple as I saw no evidence of it. Instead it is more of a museum and worships the god of money, the faith of the majority of modern Chinese. In the main hall our guide was trying to give us some information but was drowned out by a guide with a microphone and speaker set draped around her neck blaring out Chinese noise. I asked her to stop but she didn’t. Later I went to the booth where these guides are for hire and discussed the situation with the person I thought was the senior there. The strange response was “thank you.”

It is sad to see objects of devotion in such a context. There is a history of lack of respect for the divine here, not only in the Cultural Revolution era, but I wonder if it is a longer term characteristic of a country where church has served to bolster state for millennia. In a roofed verandah by the gate were carved steles of Buddha figures, most of which had their faces smashed off.

We went from there to Li Shan, Mount Li, and climbed the stairs to a crevice where Chiang Kai Shek attempted to hide when Communist troopers invaded his residence, killing all of his guards. The residence was at the Huaqing Palace and he ran to the mountain in an unsuccessful attempt to hide. We are told the rational for the capture was to get him to agree to cooperate with the Red Army to defeat the Japanese and soon he signed that agreement. The misnomer ‘peaceful’ was used for the ‘Xian Incident’ (remember the dead guards - maybe they were ‘incidental casualties’).

From there we went to a warehouse where we were forced to endure the attentions of salespeople who followed us (one each) round the shop urging us to buy and letting us know they would give us a ’special price’. Everything in Xian is at a special price. Ellen saw a beautiful malachite necklace and I succeeded in getting it for her at 60% off by being totally non-negotiable. I walked off and let the staff haggle amongst themselves about accepting my one and final offer. They came back and said yes.

The emperor’s tomb was next and I sat in the shade and had an ice cold juice while Ellen went in and sent me phone messages - “Boring!”, etc. We got back on the bus and drove to a restaurant that was once a warehouse and had been hastily furnished like a factory canteen where we were charged double the normal price for a sparse menu of Chinese food that we believe gave me diarrhoea a couple of days later. The only drinks were beer and water. The water was free and about as cool as tap water from a hot mains pipe.

Finally we arrived at the highlight of the trip, the Warriors. They are only one part of the area of Qin Shi Huang’s burial site, their hallways unsealed and invaded shortly after their entombment and the proud images of the Emperor’s soldiers smashed to a collection of fragments, thus creating the biggest jigsaw puzzle in the world, now being put together piece by piece by patient archaeologists. One of our new friends bought a book and had it signed by one of the farmers who discovered the wonder. He seemed unimpressed by the Laowai invaders now inspecting his trove and behaved rudely in carrying out his role of celebrity. This really is a wonder of the world, created at the request of one of the most successful and megalomaniac tyrants and conquerors who ever lived. The enormous area which is the site of Qin Shi Huang’s tomb dwarfs the pyramids. Only a small portion of it has been excavated by archaeologists. Much of the Terracotta Army is not to be uncovered until scientists have a solution for the rapid fading of the original bright colours under exposure to air and light.

Everyone was weary from the hot day and constant harassment to buy and the bus headed back to the city. To our dismay it pulled into a parking area and we were asked to get off again as the driver ‘had to clean the bus’. It was no surprise that we were to take shelter in a Chinese supermarket. I went to our guide, Bruce by English name, and told him that in Australia we would not accept any of the commercial pressure that had gone on during our trip and said that if they wanted us to buy stuff they should say so instead of lying to us about the bus needing to be cleaned. No cleaning was taking place. When he and I went inside to keep cool by the door we found all the other non-Chinese ignoring the shelves and as a group they approached him about the same issue. He said that the Chinese like to look at products they can’t buy in their own cities. Maybe so, the others were distributed around the aisles. I told him he should inform his boss that this sort of thing is insulting to foreign visitors.

I neglected to say we had no lunch stop because the planned restaurant had closed and the bus driver refused to look for another. Shining girl was less impressed than me, and that’s saying something.

We went shopping to buy a mobile phone Shining girl had spotted before. She checked on the internet to see if the price was as good as she thought and also looked at the features and decided it was a bargain. We went back to the department store where we saw it and bought it. The staff were very helpful and set it up in English for her.

After that we went to the agency that got us the hotel room and asked about a bus trip around several sights. The price was charged for the bus and guide and we were to pay separately for the attractions we wanted to see. This suited me as I didn’t want to see the “Tomb of Qin Shi Huang” again. It is a model based on old manuscripts and might well be very inaccurate. I’m not usually very thrilled by models as I would rather see a few pieces of the real thing. We booked to go the next morning.

Touring is surprisingly tiring and we rested a while before going out again at night. The agent had suggested we go to Da Yan Ta at 8.00pm and I gathered there was a concert on. After a Pizza Hut pizza we took a taxi which dropped us by the square behind the temple. It was clear we were in the right spot as a large crowd of people was milling around and we strolled among them heading for the back wall of Da Yan Ta. On the wall were concert sized speakers so we stayed in that area. We waited and nothing much was happening but everyone seemed to be anticipating something. I asked a tall young woman in a uniform what was happening and she told me there was going to be a concert at nine o’clock. There were fireworks in the near distance at about a quarter to nine.

At 9.00pm water began to flow over the whole length of the wall and everyone cheered. A couple of minutes later “The Waltz of the Blue Danube” played over the loudspeakers and several hundred waterspouts fountained up over the length of the square and danced in time to the music! In Beijing BMW had shown me sets of pipes in a large pool that she said were a musical fountain and I guessed the water created music as it rushed through them but the reality is more beautiful. Music played for about an hour, and the jets synchronised to it were varied in strength and lit by changing coloured lights to create the dancing effect. It is a massive display, the biggest in China, with hundreds of jets the length of what is a large public square.

The pipes of this fountain are underground and the water spurts from ground level. Dozens of people took advantage of this to get relief from the warm weather and get thoroughly soaked. It was great fun and it would have been nice to join them if I didn’t have the camera, documents, blah blah blah…

Da Yan Ta, by the way, was the home temple of the monk who set out from China at the Emperor’s request to bring copies of the Buddhist scriptures back to China. His adventures were put into writing in the fanciful and somewhat allegorical work known in English as ‘The Journey to the West’. Some of you would have seen the TV show ‘Monkey’ based on this work. The book is one of the four classic novels of China.

We made our way to the Shaanxi province museum and spent a couple of hours wandering around its halls. It has a great collection of articles from thousands of years of Chinese history. Ceramics dominate but there are many bronze vessels and weapons and carved stone statues and stone pieces from ancient buildings. There is a nice collection of Buddhas. One is serene and soft in white stone. A plump statuette of a T’ang beauty always amuses me. She looks so proud and conscious of being gorgeous, but does not fit the modern style at all.

The low point of the museum for us was a room where paintings were for sale at excessive prices. Nonetheless, the room is worth a visit if only because it gives an overview of styles of work being produced now in China. As I have said before much of Chinese art is devoted to copying the tried and true but there has been experimentation with Western approaches. Some of that has been approved by the national psyche and it is now also copied. This room had both kinds of copied items but I didn’t see anything at all that betrayed an innovative hand and eye. Most annoying, however was not the lack of creativity but the saleswoman who followed us around telling us how much of a discount she would give us on everything we looked at despite me telling her at the beginning that I would not be buying anything. She persisted and I told her explicitly but politely that she was wasting her time and I did not want to hear about prices. However she did not give up and we left feeling a little annoyed instead of feeling pleasure at the art. Hey! Chinese art is beautiful. It harbours none of the shocks that Western artists often inflict on their viewers so never leaves an ‘eeuw!’ taste in the mouth. Unfortunately, our expectation of the new and different makes us a little prone to boredom as we leave yet another display of the same paintings.

Luckily we had more exhibition halls to explore and our pleasant mood returned. One of the laudable things about this Museum is that visitors are permitted to take photos, though not to use a tripod. (Strangely, I went through the whole place with a tripod last year and no one asked me to put it away.)

Then I took SG to the street that leads to the Forest of Stones Museum. I realized she would not enjoy that kind of thing so it was not on our itinerary but the street leading there is devoted to art and has numerous shops selling papercuts, masks, brushes and ink stones, paintings and calligraphic works. Ellen bought papercuts of butterflies and I bought a nice teapot as a gift. Tea shops in China are often a pleasure to visit. We were invited to sit down by the lovely owner of the shop and she poured us tea in fragile cups as she showed us her wares and talked about them in simple English. I bought a packet of Ginseng Oolong at a quarter of the price I was asked to pay in Beijing in winter. It is pleasant and stimulates the immune system. I really believe in the power of Ginseng. It is an amazing plant.

We went back to the hotel for a rest then went out to eat at a Chinese place near the south gate of the city wall (restored perhaps a little too well so the sense of age is missing). Prices were good and so was the food. Shining girl ate chicken, potato and egg, a victory as she is as hard to feed from another culture’s cuisine as many of my Chinese friends are when I try to introduce them to Western food.

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.

On our last day in Chengdu we took the panda tour. This time we had a competent guide and the weather was good. The Panda Research Station is a nicely laid-out place with plenty of climbing platforms and other things for Pandas to play on. They are really the loveliest creatures I have ever seen, both lazier and funnier than Koalas and just as beautiful. Playful and gentle, they are a treasure we should never allow to die out. I watched incredulously as they lay sprawled on their backs reaching up the occasional lazy arm to grab another stalk of bamboo to crunch. This time we made no mistake with the camera. It would have been possible to cuddle one but the four hundred yuan ‘donation’ required seemed excessive to one dependent on a Chinese salary.

The site also has Red Pandas. I had never even heard of them but they are creatures which look like a red raccoon and lend credibility to the racoon side of the debate about whether pandas are related to bears or racoons. I wondered if Red Pandas are related to Giant Pandas. Their gentle natures and eating habits are similar but Red Pandas only require a donation of fifty yuan before they allow someone to cuddle them. SG cuddled a gorgeous little creature but had to wear plastic gloves as it sat munching a piece of apple in her lap. We were told that the reason for the gloves is that some people are allergic to the fur. I would have thought they were to keep human germs from infecting the Pandas but when one English woman said, “I don’t mind, I’m not allergic” she was allowed to handle it without the gloves.

Our American friend was in the party again and I also chatted with a lovely American lady who was in China for the second time, studying Chinese. She had taught previously. It was such a contrast to see her taking care not to block people’s view and being conscious of the effect of her presence on the convenience of others. Such un-Chinese behaviour.

We had the driver let us off near my bank on the way back and then we window shopped again and got lost as usual before getting a taxi to Grandma’s Kitchen. The food was good when we actually found something that was both on the menu and in the kitchen. That was about it for Chengdu. Being a fast reader I managed to read The Da Vinci Code, much to the chagrin of my daughter, who was still reading one of the author’s other books after several days.