(pronounced “shee ning”…)<\/p>\n
We’ve been spending a few days in Xining in Qinghai province.<\/p>\n
Things continue to get less and less Western as we continue west from Beijing.\u00c2\u00a0 For a fixed $50-$60 a night, as we progress from Beijing to Xi’an to Xining, the hotels get fancier (i.e. providing “more services”), but the actual quality goes slightly down.\u00c2\u00a0 This trend will definitely continue — our next two nights will be in a “tent hotel” by Qinghai Lake, and then we’ll be staying in some small towns as we drive towards Dunhuang, a small city.\u00c2\u00a0 Presumably the hotel rates will subside as well.<\/p>\n
China has four kinds of accommodations on their railroads, literally called “hard seat”, “soft seat”, “hard sleeper”, and “soft sleeper”.\u00c2\u00a0 The Qinghai Hotel in Xining is definitely a hard sleeper — the bed is pretty equivalent to the floor.\u00c2\u00a0 On the train, we’ve been in a “soft sleeper”, a compartment with four people.\u00c2\u00a0 We got stuck with a snorer the first night, but Ambien solved that problem for me.<\/p>\n
All of the hotels we’ve stayed in have had wired internet in the rooms, something I haven’t really ever seen anywhere else.\u00c2\u00a0 None of them “just worked” — some kind of service call has always been required to get stuff set up.\u00c2\u00a0 But it has been nice to be able to communicate.\u00c2\u00a0 I expect that this, too, will be our last opportunity, probably until we get to Urumqi in about a week.<\/p>\n
There’s a great restaurant, Ming Hao Seafood Restaurant, right next to the hotel here in Xining with no English menu, but with a picture for pretty much every item.\u00c2\u00a0 Uncharacteristically, we’ve been eating there each night instead of walking twenty minutes into town and gambling on finding a good one.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 One of the head waitresses (in black, not red or yellow) knows a lot of English food words, and has been very helpful to our picking stuff out.\u00c2\u00a0 It may be our last opportunity to have fancy city food for awhile — we’ll probably be having Muslim Uighur street food most of the next several days (actually, we had a little this afternoon in a market we were walking through).<\/p>\n
Yesterday, we arranged for a tour of the Ta’er Si Lamasery and the North Mountain Temple.\u00c2\u00a0 In Xi’an, our three-day tour included an enthusiastic young guide and a driver with a car.\u00c2\u00a0 His English was pretty good, and he encouraged our corrections to his pronunciation.\u00c2\u00a0 We got along so well that he hung out with us an extra three hours after the tour was over, and had dinner with us.\u00c2\u00a0 Our guide here in Xining, Niu Xiao Jun, was a “recommended by Lonely Planet” guide\/interpreter, but the experience was much different.<\/p>\n
He showed up at our hotel with no transportation, and suggested that it would be cheaper to go on the bus.\u00c2\u00a0 We walked a few minutes to a bus stop, and got a bus which was leaving to stop and wait for us.\u00c2\u00a0 There weren’t enough seats, and though people got up so Ray and I could sit down (we look “old”) our guide stood in the aisle.\u00c2\u00a0 They’re not supposed to do this — three times they saw a policeman up ahead, and had everyone in the aisle get out and walk or something while we zoomed ahead.\u00c2\u00a0 It took an hour and a half to get up to the lamasery.\u00c2\u00a0 It struck us as odd that a tour guide would place such little value on travel time.<\/p>\n
When we got to the lamasery, he pointed out that the $11 for his ticket wasn’t included in his price, but he was willing to wait if we didn’t want to pay it.\u00c2\u00a0 Gee, what’s the point of having a guide?\u00c2\u00a0 Telling us where the bus stop is?\u00c2\u00a0 We bought the tickets and he showed us around.<\/p>\n
Inside, there were lots of little temples with various Buddhas and arhans and other dieties and demons.\u00c2\u00a0 By far the highlight was the 10 x 30 foot double-sided sculpture mural made out of yak butter, kept in a refrigerated room.<\/p>\n
The guide came in handy when Ray took a picture of a statue, which angered some monk; he insisted that Ray “cancel” the picture.\u00c2\u00a0 Ray told the guide to tell the angry monk that he had.\u00c2\u00a0 While all this was happening, a couple other monks gave us the “we love your beard can we get a picture with you” gesture that we’re pretty used to now, which made the angry monk even angrier.<\/p>\n
We took a taxi back to town, which went directly on the freeway, and went to the Northern Mountain Temple, a Taoist temple built into the base of the mountain next to the city.\u00c2\u00a0 It had plenty of interesting images, and unfortunately is crumbling in many places — we weren’t able to go to the most precarious areas.<\/p>\n
Today we decided to visit the little provincial museum, and the great mosque.\u00c2\u00a0 On the way to the museum, we noticed that the road we were walking along had ropes strung along it, and that it was closed to traffic, and people were lining up.\u00c2\u00a0 What was happening — a parade?\u00c2\u00a0 The next clue was a sign mentioning a “race”.\u00c2\u00a0 Soon after some VIP cars drove by with spare bicycle wheels and Trek logos.\u00c2\u00a0 OK, so it was a bike race.\u00c2\u00a0 Actually, it turned out to be the Tour of Qinghai Lake, a multi-segment race like the Tour de France except that it all happens at an average of 3000 meters above sea level.\u00c2\u00a0 We hung around and watched about the first 50 riders complete the stage, which was probably about 30 km or so.\u00c2\u00a0 Then we visited the little museum, which has many more English labels since the guidebook was written, and the mosque, which indeed had a mixture of Arabic domes and Chinese eaves, but which was pretty opaque to non-Chinese non-Arabic speakers like ourselves.\u00c2\u00a0 There was a guy with a fabulous three-color beard, and a kid visiting from near Shanghai who was the only one who could speak to us in English.<\/p>\n
Tomorrow we get picked up at 8 in the morning for the drive to the lake.\u00c2\u00a0 It may be awhile before you hear from us again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
(pronounced “shee ning”…) We’ve been spending a few days in Xining in Qinghai province. Things continue to get less and less Western as we continue west from Beijing.\u00c2\u00a0 For a fixed $50-$60 a night, as we progress from Beijing to Xi’an to Xining, the hotels get fancier (i.e. providing “more services”), but the actual quality […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.apresmidi.net\/china08\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.apresmidi.net\/china08\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.apresmidi.net\/china08\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.apresmidi.net\/china08\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.apresmidi.net\/china08\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.apresmidi.net\/china08\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.apresmidi.net\/china08\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.apresmidi.net\/china08\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.apresmidi.net\/china08\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}