pulling teeth

I'm down at home in waterford for the long weekend here, so I'm back in dial-up land. Man, it's like pulling teeth! I've gone from a 3Mb broadband connection in my flat in dublin to a 56k modem connection down here - and it never even connects at 56k, most of the time it dials in at about 42k. I've forgotten what it's like to have to wait as much as a couple of minutes for each page to load. Some sites (like vodafone.ie) I even have to turn off images on 'cos otherwise it just takes too damn long! Sometims living in the city does have its advantages......

Windows crashing error - found?

Well, i think I've discovered why my gfx card has been crashing so much. It always seems to crash whenever I'm browsing the web so I decided to do a search on "ATI +mozilla + crash". The first link I saw gave me this (from the mozilla 1.2.1 release notes):

Using ATI video drivers will lead to random crashes on many sites. Mac OS ATI driver versions affected: All (?) Windows ATI driver versions affected: 5.13.1.6118 (Mac OS) Workaround: set your screen to 'Thousands of colors' rather than 'Millions'. (Windows) Possible Workaround: Revert to an older driver (6094?)-- Untested (Bug 101055)

So, looks like I'm suffering from mozilla bug 101055! Sure enough, I installed Opera instead, and for the last two days I've been crash free. I decided to go back to firefox just to try it out, and within 10 minutes had crsahed again!

the hting is, I don't rally like opera. it just seems clunkier than firefox - even with the fact that I don't have all the extensions I've come to take for granted, there are other things like pages definitely don't load as fast and sometimes images don;t load properly. Could be because it's 9.0 beta, but still. One thing I'm definitely not doing is use IExplore! Maybe when IE7 has been out for a while and ppl figure out how to disable all the sneaky stuff MS have put in.....

Going to download Mozilla 1.7 and see if the smae problem is happening there.

fecking laptop!

Well, I may be back but I didn't leave my laptop's problems behind me. I'm still getting all my display problems: the screen either greys out, goes to a negative image creeping up from the bottom right up, goes completely blank, crashes back to 640x480/16-color resolution or I just get a BSOD related to the ATI drivers. Also, sometimes when I'm playing gams, the machine will just shut down without warning. Naturally as well, all the hard rebooting isn't doing any of my other apps any good - have had to reinstall firefox and bitcomet a few times 'cos they got corrupted after a hard reboot.

It doesn't seem to matter what versions of the ATI drivers I put on, it just keeps on crashing. For a while I thought that one of my firefox tabbrowser extensions was causing some of the havoc, and it does seem like it isn't crashing as much since I got rid of it, but we're still getting crashes. Also, one wierd problem has resurfaced. Before I went to China, I was having some strange errors with the 'e' key not working while I was typing. When I went to China, the problem disappeared. Now that I'm back in Ireland, the problem is back again. Wierd.

Going to do a 'slash-n-burn' on the laptop soon, wipe the entire hard drive and reinstall from scratch. Only prob is, my windows install CD is scratched to shit, and windows is so flakey now that the CD burner won't burn properly - keep getting drinks coasters.

Hopefully that and the gfx thing are software issues, don't fancy sending the laptop back to the shop!

Beijing, the pros and cons

Things I'll miss about Beijing:

• Beijing hot-pot, spicy Szichuan food, and the food in general. Only had one or two bad dishes in 2 months!


• Low prices. Beer for €1, a full 5- or 6-dish meal for maybe €3, a 45-minute taxi ride from one side of the city to the other for €4


• The Metro system - I'm going back to the DART now! :-(


• Being able to stick my hand out on any street at any time and have a taxi within about 30secs.


• Haggling in the marketplaces - it can be surprisingly fun once you get good at it. Rule of thumb, start at about 1/10th of what they do, and if they're not coming down in price fast enough, walk away. The more pissd off the look when you hand over the money, the better the deal you got :-)


• Hot chinese & korean women - seems they keep most of the good-looking ones at home!


• Walking through the hutongs, especially Dazhalan (just south of Tian'anmen) - they're tearing that one down in a few weeks.


• Weds night in Propaganda, my local club. 50 quai (€5) in on the door and all the free cocktails you can drink, plus wall-to-wall hot korean chicks!

Things I won't miss about Beijing

• Being able to talk to maybe 1 in 10 or even sometimes 1 in 20 ppl that you pass on the street


• Having to watch out for every chinese person that come up to you in the street "at random" and starts talking to you in english - they're all trying to scam you in some way


• "looka-looka, special friend price for you" - the pushyness of most of the stall owners in the market places - you take any more than 5 secs to glance at their stuff and they're in your face. SOme of them will actually grab you by the arm and try to drag you into their stall!


• Spitting, everywhere. The women wil be a little bit more ladylike and gob in the nearest bin, but the guys will just hock it up any old where.


• Coming home at the end of a night out with your clothes reekeing of fag smoke. How soon you forget!


• Static shocks. It hasn't rained for so long in Beijing and the air is so dry that you build up a static charge just walking around, and then you get a shock when you go to touch a door handle or something. Was really bad in my apartment - sometimes you could actually see a little electric arc going from my hand to the door!

Catching up a bit - Tokyo.

Well, here I am on the way home, 39,000 feet above the Gulf of Finland, 8hrs into the flight, 2 1/2 to go. Time to catch up on the last few days!

As I've said already, Tokyo was, well, not perhaps as good as it could have been. The fun started in the airport tho, it seems for whatever reason that when you book online with Northwest Airlines, the flight times it gives you are off by about 15mins - I thought I had a 9:20am flight, but when I got to the airport at about 7:30 (plenty of time normally), the board said 9:05. Add to that the long check-in queue and the 3rd degree interrogation I got from the Public Security bureau people and I didn't made it onto the plane with a lot of tome to spare - walked straight from customs through the boarding gate! Maybe it was because the Japan part of the fight I was on was just a layover and the final destination was detroit, but the officials were very paranoid about letting me on - I got frisked twice, got asked loads of questions about what I was doing in china, and they even emptied out my bag and went through it item by item!

Once I got to my hotel in ??, I had an unpleasant realisation: I was suffering from what I called "tourist fatigue" in a previous post, I just didn't really give a damn that I was in japan, and I didn't really care about going out to see any of the touristy things! Tokyo was my 3rd new city in as many weekends, and nearly my 8th weekend in a row of going out doing touristy stuff (I had Paddy's weekend off, but that wasn't exactly relaxing either). I forced myself to go out, but it was more because I was there and I felt I had to rather than because I wanted to. Not a great introduction to a new country!

That night being saturday anyway, I headed out to the club area in Roppongi, which was only a 20min walk from my hotel. It's definitley a different experience to going out back home - most of the bars are in basements or on the 3rd/4th floors of big tall buildings. Also, if you go to the wrong side of the street (which is easy), the streets are full of black guys trying to get you to go into their clubs to see russian girls get their tits (& more) out - massagi, massagi! Now I have a rule of thumb, if you're trying to give me the hard sell to get me to go into your bar, then I definitely ain't going in, and (this is going to sound racist) that goes double if the guy giving the hard sell is black. So, I picked a few non-strip clubs to go into, and it was defintley interestng. Expensive - Y3,000 entry and about Y600 for a beer - but interesting. Japanese women are definitely a lot more liberal than the chinese, and all those rumours you hear about the wierd cosplay outfits are true - my god! I would loved to have taken some pics, but I'd probably have gotten into trouble. Unfortunatley, there was a bit of a language barrier there so I couldn't really chat any of them up (I tried, but failed). Also unfortunately, ppl in Japan tend to go out late, 12-12:30 or so and by the time the place was starting to get really busy and interesting (about 1ish), the day's travel and the 7hrs sleep in the previous 2 days had caught up with me and I had to bow out.

The next morning I checked out of the hotel and moved to the hostel I'd booked for the rest of the trip. I've found before that if you're on your own going somewhere nd you are staying in a hotel, you'll be on your own for the entire trip, which isn't good. If you stay in a hostel tho, you'll always meet up with ppl and end up going out witht hem and stuff. The hostel was in Asakusa, which was billed as the "historic heart of the city" in the blurb on the hostel booking site. Unfortunately I neglected to get me mnap out and see how far from the actual heart of the city the historical heart was - it turned out to be up in the north-west, at the very end of one of the metro lines and pretty much very nearly off my bloody tourist map! Nice area, but about 20mins by metro from Ginza and over 45 from the big shopping areas like Shinjuku or Shibuya.

The next few days I just wandered around at random, not really caring what I saw or did. I didn't even have a guide-book, all I had was a map I'd picked up in the tourist info booth in the airport. if somethign lookd interesting on the map near where I was, then I headed there. Like I said, I'd overloaded on the tourist stuff, so I was like "Hmm, a temple, just like in Beijing or Xian", or "big shopping district, yup, like Shanghai again". Having said that, the shopping areas are damn impressive: you go to Shibuya, Ikebekura, Shinjuku or Ginza after dark and there's so much neon you almost need your shades! Big shiny lights overload!

As I said, I wasn't hugely in tourist mode, so I didn't give a damn really about the usual things like the Meiji Shrine, but it was the little things that interested me there. The vending machines that are on pretty much every street are one - as well as the usual cold drinks, you can get cans of hot coffee out of them! Yes, hot, you put in the money, pop the top of the can, and you're drinking hot coffee, with or without milk (no sugar tho). Another thing was the menus in restaurants. Outside most restaurants they have a glass cabinet, with plastic models of some of the food they're serving inside. And these things look pretty damn realistic! Is a good way to browse the "mneu" before you go in, and handy too. In one restaurant, there wasn't any english menu or one with pictures (my lifesaver in Beijing) and the waiter didn't speak english, so we went out to the front of the place and I pointed to the one I wanted in the window :-) The third strange/quirky thing that got my attention was the tourist iformation maps that were up everywhere. They were very handy, but unlike anywhere else I've ever been, the maps weren't oriented north-to-south but to the direction you were facing when you were reading the map. So, if you were standing facing south-east when you were looking at it, it was oriented with the south-east at the top. Took a fair bit of getting used to!

So, Tokyo. Nice place, just a shame about my timing on going there, I'm sure I would have appreciated it more if I'd gone there directly rather than at the tail end of a longer trip.

Home at last!

Well, I made it home safe and sound anyway. What a trip back! My last day was fairly hectic, I went down to Dazhalan hutong to do a final bit of shopping and then went out for lunch with Dermot, one of the Irish guys. "Lunch" turned into drinks down in Huahai, and I only got back to my apartment at about 6pm, with still all of my stuff to pack, and no tine for one last trip down to the Silk Market. Got everything squared away eventually, nad went straight out to a bar in the Kerry Center to met Mina, the english chick I'd met at the Paddy's day ball. The bar was a fairly swanky place - low lighting, minimalist dcor, liv jazz band in the cornr, full of people in suits networking like a mad thing (loads of swapping business cards) - and 50 kuai beers! Normally the kind of place I'd avoid like the plague, but Mina is a corporat headhunter so she moves through that sort of environment like a fish through water - seemed to know everyone in the bar. She managed to score me a few free drinks off the bar manager so I'm not complaining! After a while Dermott and Fionn turned up, and seeing as they felt as out of place there as I did, we headed off down to Sanlitun to meet Peter and Sylvia, the Austrians I'd gone skiiing with before. We stayed ther a while, tehn ended up back in my usual haunt, Propaganda. As usual with Propaganda, I ended up getting to bed at 3am.

Three hours later, my alarm went off and I had to get up and get ready to lave for good. Things started off badly enough, as I was supposed to drop the keys of the apartment off with the gate guard who'd hand them into the agency later on. Thing is, no-one had told her, and she didn't speak any english, so it took 25min and the help of a few passers-by to get the point across. So, I got tot he airport a bit later than planned, but still a good bit before the normal check-in time, so I could be first in the queue and get away with the overweight luggage.

Or so the plan went anyway. Thing is, when I got there, I got stuck behind a greoup of fecking belgians who seemed to be trying to book their connecting flights from hathrow to brussles at the check-in counter, and who were all at least 7-8kg overweight with their bags. The check-in girl wasn't the most efficient either - I timed her at 15min to check in a group of 3 ppl! So, despite starting to queue at 7:45 for a 10:20 flight, I only got to the counter at about 9:15 - after having only had 8 ppl in the queue ahead of me! Miracle of miracles, my bags squeaked in under the limit - 22.5Kg. Good job they didn't check the weight of my carry-on bag, which I reckon was another 11kg or so!

I managed to get through customs and security with the minimum of hassle (a lot less than when I was going to Japan actually), and the 11hr flight passed like all 11hr flights do - slowly. Unfortunately we hit headwinds on the way over and arrived 15mins late, which meant we lost our gate slot and had to park on the tarmac at heathrow and get bussed into the terminal. The buses took another 10mins to get to us, so by the time I hit the terminal 4 building I had an hour to get to my gate at Terminal 1. Now, while the shortest distance between any two points is supposed to be a straight line, there is no such thing as the shortest distance betwen two points in Heathrow airport, and I just about got to my gate just as they were calling my row number to board - talk about tight timing!

So, finally after another hour and a half flight I was back on Irish soil at last. Unfortunately, I hit the arrivals hall at 5:20, which put me too late to get to Heuston to catch the 6:25 Waterford train (the airport to heuston station in an hour during rus hour on the friday of a bank holiday? Fuggdaboutit!). So, I hopped on the 6:30 Rapid Express bus instead. The word "rapid" in "Rapid Express" seems to come from the same place as the same word in the DART's name, to go the 120-odd miles from the airport to Waterford, it took 1/3 of the tiem that it took to fly the 9,000-odd mils form Beijing to London! Then again, I suppose the 777 didn't have to stop in every pissant little village along the way either. So, at 10pm I got off the bus at last, and by 10:30 I was home, or 23 1/2 hours after my alarm went off to start me on the journey.

Dai Jian Bai Jing!

Well, here we go. It's 6:30am, and I'm just about ready to leave for the airport. Is the 4th time in as many weekends that I've been to Beijing airport, but this tme I'm not coming back. It's a bit sad to be leaving, but also good to go home. Is going to be some culture shock when I get back! I'm a bit tired tho, my going-away party went on until 3am, so hopefully I'll be able to get some sleep on the plane. Next stop, Waterford! (well, via London and and Dublin that is........)

Last day in beijing!

Well, here we are, my last day in China. I have a lot to do today - pack the bags, tidy up the apartment, go out do a final bit of shopping, then head out and start saying my goodbyes. Busy busy busy!

My 2nd last night in Beijing turned out to be a bit of a quiet one tho. I got in from that airport about 10:30pm, and rang around to see who'd be on for going out for one or two. Strangely enough, no-one took me up on the offer! Ah well, hopefully tonight will turn out different.

THis time otmorrow, I'll be just getting on the plane home.....

Rain

Well, when I left Beijing it had rained there once sonce I got there, and only for about an hour or so. I've defintely made up for it here now! It started raining yesterday about lunchtime, and hasn’t really stopped since. Was really heavy earlier today, but is still drizzling most of the time. I guess it's good in a way tho, it's acclimatizing me to the weather I'll be going back home to! 　

Akihabara

Well, to quote Martin Luther King: "I have been to the mountain-top, and I have seen the promised land". If you mention the name "Akihabara" to a computer geek, chances are the response will be similar to if you mentioned "Mecca" to a Muslim. Akihabara is the techy toy district in a country famous for its techy toys. If you're into computer gadgets, chances are it went on sale here well before you even heard of it.

So, what's it like? Well, from all the talk about it you'd expect it to be a cross between Blade Runner and the Jetsons, with everyone whizzing around on theor own private hover transporters and talking into star-trek type tricorders. Well, it's not, it's just a few streets with a load of techy shops on them - you'll see more neon in Shibuya or Shinjuku. The shops themselves tho are mad, most would be 7-8 floors, with laptops and phones on the first floor, cameras on the 2nd, big-ass HDTVs on the third, DVDs on the 4th, games on the 5th etc - and a big-ass collection of japanese manga/porn in the basement. Some shops vary the mix a bit, but that's the general pattern. Then there are shops which just do comics, or models, all that wierd crap the japanese just love. You see some of that stuff maybe in places like Forbidden Planet back home, but that'd be less than 1/10th the quantity & quality in any one of these stores - and there are plenty of stores. I'd love to have taken some pics to show what they're like, but surprisingly, they have a "no photos" policy in most of the shops....

I've said here before that if my friend Louise ever went to the Silk market or the Pearl Market in Beijing, you'd need a SWAT team and a stick of dynamite to get her out again. Well, this would go double for Vicky in Akihabara, and her fiancee Mick would be no help in shifting her out of it 'cos he'd probably be in the store next door! :-) About the only thing that would limit the average geek's spending spree here is the how much space is left in their credit card account and what the luggage allowance is on the flight home. I wasn't really there to shop, and I was soooo tempted on more than one occasion just to say "what the hell" and break out the plastic!

Having said that, I was disappointed in my #1 search when I was there. The one thing I came here with big hopes of getting is a shiny new mobile phone. Well, I hit one big snag in that regard - all the phones here use CDMA, while back home we use GSM, two totally different and incompatible networks. So, I could buy a phone here, but I couldn't use it at home. Also, the quality of the phones here isn't all that great, looks-wise. They may have all these fancy network features under the hood but on the outside they tend to be all clam-shells with fairly clunky cases. Not what I had in mind at all! There are some GSM phones, but they're pretty much the same samsung, motorola and nokia crap you can get back home - no point really. I can actually get a better (usable) selection in Beijing!

I did however pick myself up a nice shiney (well, black case) Sony Cyber-shot DSC-9T camera! Well, I couldn't come home empty handed now could I? :-)

Tokyo

Well,　here I am, in another country where I can't speak the lingo. 8 weeks of building　up my (really basic) chinese skills, and now I'm back to not understanding a word. I have a total of two words of japanese "Konichiwa" and "Arigato" - at least they're useful anyway!

Tokyo is, well, nice. I know I don't sound enthusiastic here, but this is my third city in as many weekends, and my 8th weekend in a row doing the tourist thing. I think I'm suffering from "Tourist Fatigue". I'm sure if I was getting here fresh off the boat (so to speak) I'd be having a ball, but I've been on the go too long. The fact also that I haven't had a load of sleep in the last few days might be a factor as well. So, I'm walking around, pretty much at random not caring whether I see everything or not. I don't even have a guide book, just a map!

That's not to say that I'm not doing the tourist thing, I've been fairly busy. yesterday I managed the Tokyo Tower, Shinjuku & Rappongi despite not getting settled in the hotel until 5pm, and today I got in the Meiji Shrine, Ginza, the Imperial Gardens and Ikebekura. So, not just sitting on my ass!

Anyway, more when I get back to Beijing.

Last day in beijing office!

Wow, where did the time go? I'm on my last day in the Beijing office already! It doesn't feel like two months have passed at all, but this time tomorrow I'll be in Tokyo and this time next week I'll be on the plane home to Ireland.

It's been a bit of a whirlwind two months. I definitely haven't been sitting on my ass here anyway - reckon on average I've been going out doing stuff two out of every three days/nights I've been here (if not maybe a bit more), which isn't too bad a ratio, especially considering all that inconvenient "work" stuff that keeps getting in the way! It's been a bit tiring though, especially the last week. I think I've been out every night since maybe just after I came back from Shanghai 2 weeks ago, and it doesn't look like it'll be stopping any time soon either. I think the next time I'll get a good full night's sleep will be when I get back home! I definitely didn't get it last night anyway. Went out with some of the irish guys for wha probably will be my last visit to the local nightclub (Propaganda, in Wudaokou) and ended up getting in at about 6am! Reckon that's the latest night yet, but not by much.

At least I don't have to worry too much about rushing to get my project done before I leave now. it seems that at some stage over the last few weeks while I've been busting my ass to get it finished for today, working until 7, 7:30 or even pm, the managers decided that there was still too many legal issues to be resolved with the code and so they bumped out the schedule untilt he end of the next quarter in June. Only problem is, they sort of forgot to tell us, the engineers who were actually workign on it (I mean, why would we want to know something as trivial as that?). We knew we weren't going to get everything done by tht iem I left, but we thought we had to have a large section of it finished and released. Now we don't! I love the way Sun works sometimes......

rain!

It's raining here. First time I've seen rain in 2 months! it's not exactly up to the standard of what we get back home, but water defintely is falling fomr the sky. it seems some of the locals aren't quite sure what to do with it, there's been a few "working form home today because of the weather" emails gone out, and a few of them pulled out of my going-away lunch 'cos they said they felt a little sick didn't want to catch cold on the way to the restaurnat. Wimps!

What I am more worried about here is the traffic. I know the way back home that if it hasn't rained for a few weeks the roads get a bit slick and a bit dodgy to drive on. Well, after 3 months without rain here, I shudder to think the amount of slicks we'll get on the roads. It's not like the locals are the safest drivers in the world either...... Will be extra-careful crossing the roads here today!

getting my bags home

I was just looking on the BA website and I reckon I'm going to have a lot of fun with getting my bags home. Apparenlty the weight allowance for non-US international flights with BA is 23kg per passenger, with a penalty of £30 per kilo for overweight bags. This is a bit steep compared to going to the US, where you get to have 32Kg per bag (not per passenger), and get charged £60 per overweight bag (not per kilo). Looks like I may have to lie at the airport, say I'm going to LA or NY, and then once I get through the gate, hop on the correct flight! :-)

One option which I hope may pan out is if I use the automated check-in, when I was flying out here and used that with Are Lingus they never checked teh weight, they just tagged the bags and shoved them on through.

Xi'an

Well, I think I made a tactical error in my weekend travel plans. As I said last weekend, I probably gave myself too much time in Shanghai, and this weekend I didn't give myself enough time in Xi'an.

The trip definitely started off better than Shanghai - for one the plane took off on time so I got in around teh tiem I should have, and then I discovered that China Northwest Airlines ran a minibus service from the airport to town for Y25, so I dind't have to worry about getting fleeced by taxi drivers. the bus drops you in the heart of the city, right beside the Drum Tower, so all I had to do then was a 5-min walk down to the south gate to my hostel! I was booked in and back out on the street for a bit of a wander by 8:30pm, by which point the week before I hadn't even boarded the plane in Beijing!

Again, compared to last week where Shanghai didn't leave me with much of a good first impression, Xi'an was the opposite. Where Shanghai had been dead, Xi'an was buzzing! I went out to see what the South Gate (nan men) looked like by night, and it was pretty impressive.


Lots of people around, even at 10pm!

I wandered around a bit then, up to the Drum & Bell towers, up around the Muslim Quarter, and then managed to find a restaurant which had an english menu. I decided to see if Xi'an hotpot was as good as Beijing hot-pot, and it's pretty close all right. After stuffing my face on semi-identifiable meats, I left the restaurant intent on more sightseeing, but by that stage a dust storm had blown up. Within a few mins it was blowing pretty string, and ppl were scurrying for whatever cover they could find. Nasty stuff dust storms, gets in your eyes, your mouth, up your nose, so I decided at that stage to call it a night and go back to the hostel.

Next morning I was up bright and early (ish), and decided to head and see the Terracotta Warriors. I decided to decline the Y165 tour that the hostel was running and instead went for the slightly cheaper option of taking the locla bus for Y8 return! As I've done so many times in Beijing tho, I misunderstimated teh distance between the south gate and thetrain station, and what looked an easy stroll on the map turned into a 45min hike. I eventually got there anyway, and after literally having to fight my way onto the 306 bus out to Bingmayong I made it out to the museum by about 11am.

The first thing that struck me about the museum was that they could have put the car park about 500m closer to the museum entrance than they did, but i guess what would mean the tourists would have less distance to run the gauntlet of souveneir hawkers and freelance tour guides (Y150 for an hour's tour apparently), and you have to support local enterprise I guess. he second thing that struck me was that you come a liong wayt o see not very much, as in the first pit I went into (pit 2) they stll hadn't uncovered the roofs of most of the chambers holding the figures, so all you could see was a few trenched dug in the dirt and a few fragments of figurines. I'm sure it'll be impressive enough in a few years when thy aactually dig all the guys out tho.

And then I got to Pit 1, and the real deal.

There's apparenly over 6,000 in the main chamber, and they reckon they could find at least up to 10,000 when they dig them all out. What got me was tho that rather than taking the easy way out, having 1 or two moulds and churning out 6,000 near-identical figures, it looks like every figure has different facial features and expressions, and are slightly differnt sizes, just like a real army would have. Now that's attention to detail!

After soaking in the sights for awhile, I headed back to Xian city where I had a lot to do and not mcu time to do it in. So, after already been walking around all morning, I went to see the drum tower, the bell tower, the mosque (walked by but didn't go in, not that impressive apparently), the Forest of Stelaes museum, and the market place by the south gate. After that, not being content with the paltry amount of exercise I'd gotten, I went up on the city walls, where you can hire a bike and ride along the top of the wall around the whole city! So, i did just that, and did the 14km round trip in about 70mins. The wall is damn inpressive, about 12m high and 15m at the top - you could stick a road along the top if you wanted to.
It was 700-year-old paving stones tho, and on the high nelly bike I had it was definitely a teeth-rattling ride!

After that, I decided enough was enough for one day so headed out to get some food from the street vendors. I don't know what I had, but it was tasty and one of the deep-fried things I had on skewers could have been chicken. I had every intention then of heading out to see the Xi'an nightlife, but when I hit the hostel I got chatting to a few other travellers and ended up drinking beer and playing pool in the hostel bar until 1:30am.

Four hours later I was up and about again, to check out and get to the airport for my 8:30am flight (which is what I get for choosing cost over convenience). I'd been a bit wary of how to get back to the airport, as I'd heard stori aboutt eh Xi'an taxi drivers offering you what seems like a reasonablly cheap price to get there, but then stopping the taxi half-way out the motorway and threatening to dump you htere if you don't pay at last double. Luckily, the same bus I'd gotten into town started its return trips at 6am so I was spared discovering if that were true. Things passed uneventfully and I was back in my flat in Wudaokou by 10:30, or about the time I'd be waking up normally!

So, Xi'an, lovely place, so much to see and do that I only covered less than half. Anohter place to add to my list of "must see" next time I come back to china!