Vladimir & Suzdal: Quaint, Charming Towns in Russia's Golden Ringby Randi / July 3, 2017
June 28-29, 2017
Middle of Russia
Middle of Russia
Dear Little Laptop Diary,
Well. The St. Petersburg-Moscow sleeper really spoiled me and set my expectations too high. Hell, 2003-era New Jersey Transit set my expectations too high. Our first superlong train, the 24 hour sleeper from Vladimir to Yekaterinburg, was a bit dismal. The cabin was fine, it really was, and we had a very nice older Russian lady in with us who helped us make our beds when we proved completely incompetent on that front (the mattress pad doesn’t go IN the duvet-cover looking thing, YOU do! Or nothing does! Still unclear!). But that first sleeper to Moscow was oh so special. They gave us slippers for crying out loud! Our beds were made for us! They were comfy! There were no slippers to be found on this one. And thank the lord I brought flip flops, because the toilets were the most disgusting I have seen since our non-sleeper train throughout the countryside of Bosnia. At least on that train I didn’t have to take my contacts out. On this one I did. It was horrific. The floor was wet and coated in sludge, the soap dispenser was dry, and the toilets were reminiscent of Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor ones. I should have remembered Amtrak the first time I had to use the sink, because I wasted 10 minutes trying to get it to work by turning the spigots as you do normally before I finally asked a Russian lady to help. It was the kind of sink you had to push up with your palm to get a trickle of water out. My god. On the Moscow sleeper I accidentally brushed my teeth with the train water; I wasn’t thinking because it was all so clean and nice. We were definitely using bottled water for this one.
Scenery’s nice
The samovar, one in every carriage. So you can always get boiled water for instant meals and tea. |
Down the hallway of our carriage. Rooms to the right, samovar straight ahead, toilet after the samovar, my exercise barre to the left, cigarette smoke everywhere |
At about 9pm I realized that the lady had fallen asleep, which is like wow I wish I could fall asleep with all these Russian children shouting. And someone nearby is smoking, which is not allowed but I guess Russia goes in the way of Greece where smoking isn’t ‘legally’ allowed but it is culturally always allowed and just ugh smoking is disgusting.
It’s the rockiest train journey I’ve ever taken, the kind where you are tensing your whole body so you don’t fly off the seat. Of course I couldn’t sleep like that! I was being thrown around my little bed mat by every bump and turn. It also made a lot of overnight stops, and when the train stops it’s like the world is stopping. The huge brakes made the loudest banging noises like we were being attacked. At least 30 times during the night I thought the train was going off the rails, it was that bumpy and uneasy. At the 5:30am stop, our second stranger cabinmate arrived, for the bed above mine. She had to stand along the side of my bed in order to make hers. Needless to say I didn’t sleep until maybe 7am, until 9:45. What a great rest. The other woman, the older one who seemed so nice, had the attendant close our cabin’s window because it would blow on her neck on the top bunk. But like. We are four people in an enclosed closet and you’re shutting off our air supply? Nyet nyet nyet! Also, fresh cool air is the only thing that really helps my constant motion sickness, so taking that away from me meant a restless night of severe nausea, discomfort, strangers, and tears.
Also, the sun is still rising like it did in Helsinki and all through Russia so far — at 3am. At some point in the night I lost my eye mask.
When I gave up trying to sleep, I brushed my teeth and washed my face with bottled water (hard to do the latter). The stranger above me was ready to eat her food which means she had to sit on my bottom bunk and use the small table that Husband and I both banged our heads on repeatedly during the night. So I just kind of stood in the cramped hallway for a few hours by the open windows out there (yesss) as more people smoked illegally and I tried to relax. There’s a bar running along the hallway so I did some barre exercises which a small boy found HILARIOUS. I felt a lot better after doing them though. The nausea got a little better with the fresh air and I had an orange that I brought for breakfast. I reclaimed my table and wrote for a few hours before a lunch of dehydrated vegetable crackers I got at Veggie Bro in Vladimir. Interesting day, I must say. Happily, I didn’t realize that 2 of the 26 hours of this train journey were just time zone changes (we are going through so many time zones jesus this country is enormous) so we have only 6-7 hours left! Ugh I can’t believe this is only the first of its kind. Once we land in Yekaterinburg, we have a night in a nice hotel, which seemed like a really sweet idea at first, to pamper ourselves after all these hostels and immediately after this first gross train – and immediately before our big 3-day gross train – but I think it might just feel like when Lewis Black talked about how the government one year gave refunds of $350 to people with kids to help out with that and he said it would have been nicer to them to just knock on their doors and piss on their feet. What I’m saying is I think a hotel might just make me feel worse about going back to close proximity with strangers for 3 days and the grossest bathrooms ever. At least not using my contacts for that long will be good for my dry eyes. Man alive.
People are still smoking, which is just like really cute for all of us. I love when people flout rules and common decency. At least some of the scenery is starting to get pretty. We just passed a big river which was nice. And we passed Chaykovskaya station, which is where the composer Tchaikovksy was born. It’s fun not having to worry about how to spell that in English anymore because it’s just made up transliteration. Like Chanukah! Spell it however you want when it’s not in its real language. Anyway, so Chaikoffskee was born near this station so they named it after him. Our guide book says that historians now believe that instead of dying from cholera, he was blackmailed into taking poison when his affair with a nobleman’s nephew came to light. So I guess that is worse than all these gross train journeys. As long as I don’t use the tap water. Oh also I figured out why the toilets get locked at every station besides trying to make me explode – because they ‘flush’ just onto the tracks so they don’t want the station tracks to be disgusting like the countryside tracks. Seriously the flush is a lever you step on that just opens the bottom of the toilet and you can see onto the tracks. I need to stop thinking of my clean bathrooms at home, my lovely clean bathrooms with potable water. I’m having a hard time remembering why any sane person would leave those bathrooms. Oh right to see the world.
We are at a longer stop right now called Perm, which is where they do fun curly hairdos that work on 9% of women, so most people disembarked to buy food from the babushkas selling all kinds of things on the platform. I am guarding our stuff. Outside my window right now, there is a babushka singing a traditional Russian folk song (I mean I’m guessing but come on it’s not like it’s a Nicki Minaj song) and intermittently she will stop singing to scream at someone who crossed her. I can’t see any of the babushkas with food, but I do see the ice cream cart (everywhere you go in Russia!) and it is swarmed, of course. Z money just came back and said the babushkas failed him and only had ice cream and soda and bags of chips and stuff, which is laaame. Luckily we brought tomatoes, cucumbers, and bread so we will make sandwiches. Sure to be better than my dinner last night of plain bread and cinnamon-y cookies I found at a supermarket (sure of their veganness this time because they also had English ingredients!!!) .
Overall, I’m grateful that the strangers are nicer than they could have been, I’m grateful that older lady allowed me to open the window for the daytime, I’m grateful to Iberia for our last flight when the soap dispenser wasn’t working and they showed me where they kept the single-serve liquid soap packs and I took a lot for this trip because we will DEFINITELY need them, and I’m grateful that I’m not being blackmailed into taking poison. I will keep repeating this to myself as a reminder that it’s not so bad, that we could smell worse, that I could be really sick and I’m not, that everything could be worse. As it is, I’m just on a kind of gross train through Russia and out of my comfort zone of silence and cleanliness. It’ll be okay.
Okay older lady just shut the window again goddammit.
Our cabin with two strangers. Would end up being one of the better/nicer experiences of its kind! Stay tuned.
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Xi’an, China: Some Sights, Some Crowds, and Yes, Those Famous Foods
After our lovely time in Chengdu, I said a tearful goodbye to the Fraser Suites and we headed towards Xi’an for four days. We knew we had to see the Terra Cotta Warriors, and we were super excited for a change of pace foodwise. Xi’an is in a section of China that is heavily Muslim, so there would be mosques to see instead of Buddhist temples, and the city has a famous food stall market in the Muslim Quarter that was supposed to be amazing. And it was, although the rest of our time there left us a little less than thrilled. Like I’ve been saying for a month now, we cannot get used to the lack of awareness for other people – the pushing, the walking into others and having no one bat an eye. It’s not like Chinese people are trying to be rude or pushy or anything! It just is. Like we watched a woman on her phone walk straight into another person and neither of them flinched. We are definitely the weird ones here being like WHY ARE YOU PUSHING ME and we will never get used to that!
Aside from that though, I guess we enjoyed our time in Xi’an. To get there, we got on – you know it – another sleeper train. It was PRAISE BUDDHA cleaner and slightly nicer than the last few have been! It was still a K train, so the same style and overall look, but our bags actually fit under the bunks, the sheets weren’t noticeably stained with the residue of Other People, the sink drained into a pipe and not onto the floor, and there was actually soap in there! Also, the strangers we shared with were fine. There was one lady who stayed in the hallway the entire time until sleepytime, and then there was an older couple sitting on the other bottom bunk until the man went to sleep in another room. I was nervous that they were gonna be sharing the bed (as we’ve heard some couples do to skirt buying two tickets) and we’d have 3 adults with us but luckily that wasn’t the case. And luckily, it was the man who left us, because a) it’s always better to room with women (sorry it is true from all these months of train travel), and VERY MUCH BECAUSE b) the man was farting all evening. It was SO BAD! Old man farts! I had to wear my mask it was nauseating. His farts were worse than smoke oh my god it was atrocious. When it was apparent that he was the one leaving us we finally breathed out of our noses and shouted BYE FARTY DON’T LET THE DOOR HIT YOU IN THE ASS OR MORE FARTS MIGHT COME OUT.
Xi’an Train Station
We got to Xi’an and headed to our hostel, the Seetang Youth Hostel. Um, our room didn’t have windows. That’s not good. Well, it did have one piece of wall that opened, but it opened into the hallway, which does not count as a window and also WHO would use that and let strangers look at them in bed? Weirdest. The walls were extremely thin, and we heard all the usual hostel noise – people shouting at all hours, people listening to music at all hours, people stomping about like they are trying to break through the floors. It was loud, is what I’m saying. And people were smoking everywhere! I asked the main staffer if smoking was allowed everywhere and she looked horrified and said no but guess who did nothing about the rampant smoking everywhere, that’s right she and the rest of her staff. Blargh. She also said they had laundry on ‘the fifth floor’ and I spent a long while searching the big building for stairs that led anywhere to a fifth floor but couldn’t find it. We later learned that the fifth floor was actually THE ROOF. I did not do laundry.
why would i photograph that room this is the view from the roof /’fifth floor’
The bed and bathroom were fine at least and relatively clean, so it was overall fine. The turn right before it was a trash alley so that stunk (lolol) to have to walk that every time we came and went. But was good to stay in a place we didn’t want to actually stay in all day I GUESS. So we did more in Xi’an than we did in Chengdu – which also means we were out in the crowds most of the time. By now, we have zero patience left. We’ve been in China for a month, with more to go, and we are soooo done with the pushing and shoving and lack of regard for anyone else’s personal space or even person. A small boy jumped off a ledge and landed ON Z’S LEGS. Like a monkey. Z was like WHAT THE F IS HAPPENING and the boy just ran off like it was nothing. I CANNOT.
the road our hostel was on
We arrived in Xi’an covered in sleeper train residue and ready to eat some good Muslim food. We took a taxi to the hostel (it was easier than navigating the subway or buses in our state), which caused us a great deal of anguish as all taxi rides here have. Every time, the driver either yells at us in Chinese or overcharges us or does some miscellaneous stupidness that we can’t do anything about and it’s so frustrating. But anyway. We got to the Seetang, showered in the windowless room, and went out in search of food. Our hostel was about 10 or 15 minutes walk from a big mall, which is always promising, and we found exactly what we wanted on the top floor – a food court! Now, Chinese mall food courts are unnecessarily complicated affairs. In Bangkok, I remember we had to purchase little credit card type things in advance and put a certain amount of money on them and then go to the different vendors for food and pay with the card. It was a little complicated, but it was clearly laid out and we figured it out. In China, a lot of food courts do similar things as far as prepaying goes, but they make no sense. No signs, no visible station or person selling the cards or even just taking money. It’s all very confusing, and no one is willing to work with us by using nonverbal communication to try to figure it out. NO ONE POINTS. We try to use clearcut hand signals while trying to say Chinese words and 100% of the time Chinese people will just continue to shout at us in Chinese with no attempt at meeting us halfway, or even 10%. Seriously, how do Italians stand being in China? NO one will use their hands. For instance, like with numbers. If we ask if there are 1 or 2 of something, it’s pretty easy to guess what we are getting at using our hands, and very easy to give the correct answer. But instead, they will just say the Chinese word for 1 or 2. Ahhh.
Anyway, I was getting very hangry and had just pointed to some vegetables in the food court and they wouldn’t let me pay because I had to have paid beforehand (not a card thing, just paying a random lady in advance). HOW DO YOU PAY BEFORE YOU KNOW WHAT YOU WANT OR CAN EVEN GET. FFS I hate stupid systems. Luckily someone took money out of my hand and walked to another end of the hall to a random woman behind a counter just like all of them, and then came back with my change and a receipt?? How was I supposed to figure any of that out? Oh China why do you HATE ME.
Luckily, they had easily identifiable bowls of vegetables and I ate them and it was okay in the end.
Little random bowls – a broccoli salad, cabbage in soy, some kind of mashed green with a couscous sort of thing, and a bowl of steamed pumpkin or sweet potato that was TOO MUCH PLAIN but eh whatever, vitamins.
Next door to the food court was a Coco Bubble Tea so I was happy!
The mall of course rewarded our struggles with some nice signage:
LITTLE PRETTY UNDERWEAR
the mall in the middle of everything that has vegetables and bubbles
After eating, we walked around town and saw the Bell Tower and the Drum Tower, the two big sights of the city center that are nicely visible from most of the city center. We visited them both another day (and walked around them 10x every day), and I like that they face each other across a little expanse of crazy busy city, like two pillars in the face of modernity, amid the chaos.
So, the Bell Tower is smack in the center of everything – on like an impenetrable traffic island surrounded by the main roads and separating everything important from each other. Meaning, to cross the main roads in the very center of things (which we did 100x a day), you have to go underground and use this enormous underpass circle of hell. It was always packed and hot and loud and PACKED DID I SAY PACKED and just kind of annoying to have to go up and down, up and down (I will lead them up and down, I am feared in field and town…can’t help it) all the time and around and around. One bend of this circle of hell is the metro station, one is the exit to our favorite little street that led to the Muslim Quarter/Market, and one is the Bell Tower ticket window and entrance, which at all times of day and night had a super long line of tourists waiting to buy tickets. BIGGEST TIP FOR VISITING: Go to the Drum Tower first, because you can buy combined tickets for both towers there, and thus can skip the crazy underground line for the Bell Tower. The crowds inside both actually seemed the same, yet the line at the DrumT was maybe 3 people long, so I guess the ticket sellers and takers at the DrumT are just more efficient than the BellT. We felt like SUCH BADASSES walking past that endless line of Chinese domestic tourists at the BellT and flashing our combined tickets and just strolling right through.
Drum Tower
Both towers date from the 14th century but were renovated or reconstructed in different subsequent centuries. The Bell Tower would ring its bell at dawn, and the Drum Tower would beat out dat rhythm on its drums to mark dusk. Cute. I like the Drum Tower more, maybe because it was coverd with drums, LIKE IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE, while the Bell Tower had ONE MEASLY BELL.
…till you try?
LOVE that they painted the security camera so cute!
The view of the Bell Tower (and Xi’an) from the Drum Tower
The Bell Tower
the one bell
I liked these sites though because they were quick and easy to navigate, leaving ample time for more important things – exploring the Market food and getting sooo many fun drinks. Okay, we will save all that for the end because it’s the best part.
Another day, we took the metro (again, completely identical to every Chinese city’s metro) to the Big Goose Pagoda, also known as the Wild Giant Goose Pagoda, also called (by me) the HEHE GOOSES Pagoda. We went on the hottest day, and it was a 30-40 minute walk from the nearest subway station so it was rough (there’s actually a station literally on its grounds, but google maps didn’t know about it you stupid pos I hate you I HATE YOU). The pagoda is apparently Xi’an’s most famous landmark, which seems like b.s. to me but that’s probably because of the crowd. It was bad, guys. See there’s a lot of shit happening at this pagoda. First of all, it’s another of those double ticket ordeals – you buy a ticket to the grounds and then find out it doesn’t include the pagoda. When you walk a little more, there’s another ticket office for the pagoda itself. i hate that b.s. No one is entering these little bits of grounds and not going to the pagoda. It puts me in a horrid mood. Anyway, fine, two tickets needed, got it. But no. In all of China, there’s been preeeeetty decent set ups for tourist sites with stairs specifically for going up and then another set for going down, to help the crowd flow. Even at the Bell and Drum Towers they had this. But the Pagoda was the first place I can remember that not only didn’t, but only had one teeny tiny thin winding stairway AND didn’t control the flow of guests. So we climbed up seven floors with the worst of humanity. There were children pushing through legs with their parents doing nothing to stop them; men pushing you from behind to what, make you go faster?; and overall just horribly behaved people. It was terrifying and terrible, trying to climb these stairs. It was also very hot, 98 degrees outside, and at least 15 degrees hotter in this unventilated narrow building. As you may have guessed, it was not my favorite visit.
I liked that the pagoda, from the 7th century, is situated among all these modern office buildings, but you can see that from outside. Inside the only benefit was exercise. There was nothing else going for it.
A site we absolutely loved was the Great Mosque, hidden behind the crazy busy Muslim Quarter’s Market. It’s very centrally located and yet provides a drastic change to the chaos outside its walls – it provides calm and peace. It’s a beautiful mosque, mixing Islamic traditions with Chinese architecture to make a very interesting and pleasant space. The Muslims working there and praying there made us feel very welcome, smiling at us and shaking Z’s hand. It was a necessary respite from the craziness of the city and was really beautiful. It felt nice to visit this sacred spot before eating ALL OF THEIR FOOD outside in the market.
And, before we get to that part, we of course have to talk about the #1 thing to do in Xi’an – visit the Army of Terra Cotta Warriors. You know these guys, you’ve seen pictures. Honestly, the pictures are better. The TCW is the biggest shitshow in all of China. Everything else that I’ve said is ‘so crowded and so pushy and so demoralizing’ PALES in comparison to this situation (except the Big Goose Pagoda in the height of summer; that was indeed shit). People push and walk into you with no regard for any of your space even between your toes just RAM right into you no matter where you are.
Anyway. To get there, we walked 45 minutes to the train station to get a bus for 8 yuan that goes to the site. Even though the bus has ‘terra cotta warriors’ painted on the side, it still made some stops along the way. The book and the lady who directed us onboard said it just took an hour but because of the stops and stuff it was closer to an hour and a half. Okay, fine. But noooo. This POS bus driver dropped us down the road from the entrance, and across the street. And not some suburban little road either, oh no, it was a highway. That we had to walk along and cross. WTF, STUPID F-ING BUS. I’m still livid at them. Other buses were clearly dropping off at the entrance. We crossed with the rest of the passengers for safety in numbers but it was still ridiculous and terrifying. Finally we go inside, and we can’t find any signs for ticket office. We see endless rows of stalls and kiosks selling food and crappy crap and drinks and lanterns and string and stuff and NO TICKET OFFICE. We walked for more than 20 minutes and finally saw a sign for the ticket office. Inside that building was a long line, and tickets cost 150 yuan, around $23 each. After you exit with tickets, you walk ANOTHER 20 minutes through a maze and a park to the actual site. By this point we had cursed more than we ever had in our lives. There are several buildings on the grounds – all poorly signed, of course, and nothing in English. We figured out from a map which buildings were Pits 1, 2, and 3, the main things to see. This of course after we went in a building that was a worthless small museum. Most people do the pits in order, but DON’T. It will make everything even worse. We did 2-3-1 and I recommend that, or do 3-2-1, but whatever you do, save Pit 1 for last. It’s the only one that’s actually cool. Pit 2 is the most boring, with most of it just surrounding an excavation site that is mostly sand with nothing to show for it really. Pit 3 is slightly less boring, with a few things actually visible. Pit 3 seems to be the army headquarters, and many of the greatest warrior finds are army officers, generals and such, who are encased in glass around the perimeter. Pit 1 is where the real Army is. Pit 1 is the best, but it is the pits in terms of crowds and pushing. I’m sorry I’m such a broken record so here are pictures.
Pit 1
Pit 2
Pit 3 at least I think
It was definitely the right choice to do it in this order, to be able to end on a high note. Well, on a Middle C, considering how…underwhelming it all is. The warriors are scattered in different pits and rarely can you catch a glimpse through the throngs of people where they actually look as cool as they do in pictures. Okay, don’t get me wrong, I sound ridiculous, I know. It is a VERY AWESOME architectural site, it’s just that it has been hyped beyond what it actually is. If you haven’t seen pictures taken from just the perfect spot to make it look like it goes on forever with intricate statues, then you will be impressed. Or, hey, if you just DON’T GO IN THE SUMMER, you’ll have a better experience (honestly if you go any place in China NOT in summer, you’ll have a better experience than I did in said place).
There aren’t really signs explaining what’s even going on – I didn’t see any in Chinese either, but people could have been blocking them – so I learned from our guidebook. The Warriors are more than 2000 years old, and there are thousands of them, still being excavated. They stand as guardians to the tomb of Qin Shi Huang (his actual tomb is illegal to visit), China’s first unifier. They were only discovered in the 1970s, which must have turned the world upside down.
I know you are probably shaking your head at me like ‘girl do you just complain about everything, this site is amazing’ and it really is, it’s just that a) if it wasn’t hyped to high heaven it would have been more enjoyable and really b) if we didn’t have to fight tooth and nail to get a look at any of it, I’m sure we would have loved it. CHINA IN SUMMER IS NO JOKE. There’s a reason they tell westerners not to go now. OH OH AND C) if the grounds were designed as a labyrinth meant to claim 90% of visitors as victims to its non-navigable twist and turns and impasses and OMG JUST HAVE SIGNS AND NOT AN HOUR OF BULLSHIT TO GET TO THE TICKETS.
Getting back to town was even worse.
There were no signs ANYWHERE for buses. We walked for ages through a maze of parking lots and random buildings and kiosks – still on the grounds – before we found signs for buses. They went to Xi’an North Station, which is quite far from the downtown and isn’t the main station. All we finally saw for the main station – for getting freaking to the city from this huge site – was a hand-written piece of printer paper taped to a pole that said ‘Xi’an Station’. So we followed the arrow drawn on it to the street and found a lady who said ‘Xi’an?’ We said yes and she dragged us onto a PACKED bus, with no seats. We said nah we will wait for the next one. Then that bus pulled ahead and stopped a bit farther along the curb, and she yelled go go go! and forced us to get on the same exact bus! The three of us were in the aisle trying to figure out if maybe there were seats and then before we could get off because there weren’t, it was too late! Ahhh we were freaking out. The crazy lady – who was ALSO onboard now – starting pulling random kids out of seats and putting them elsewhere, like putting 3 kids in 2 seats, to make seats for us. And we couldn’t tell her to stop so it was just soo embarrassing. And then it cost 10 yuan instead of 8! I was so mad about it all but then it got us back faster than the bus there so whatever. Oh what a mess EVERYTHING we try to do here is!
OK. FOOD TIME.
This is where I LOVED Xi’an. We went to a few restaurants but mostly ate at the Muslim Quarter market, which was sooo much fun. First, I’ll share the good food we had at Ding Ding Xiang restaurant, a recommendation from our guide book that had good food. A man started smoking and we complained to a waitress, and instead of stopping it, she brought him a bowl to use as an ashtray. Oh ffs, China. We moved upstairs (so many restaurants have so many empty floors) and they protested no don’t go up there! but we were like, we’re either sitting away from the man you’re allowing to smoke in here or we are leaving. So they relented and luckily the food was good. I couldn’t walk away from a place that actually had vegetables! So hard to find in these parts.
From above, we had sauteed sesame spinach, sword beans and roasted eggplant, and cabbage with tofu. All of it was so good! There was a lot of food too, so we brought leftovers back to the hostel fridge for the next day (which was a travel day, so this was necessary). Unfortunately, the shitty Seetang staff didn’t know how to open the room with the fridge when we left the next morning so we lost our leftovers. SO SAD. God customer service here is abysmal. But the food is good!
I also found good vegetables at what we think was Muslim Family Restaurant, part of the Muslim Quarter but a sit-down place instead of only stalls on the street. (They had a kebab counter out front as part of that.) They had a salad bar type set up of veggie dishes, and it was a little hard at first to communicate that that’s all I wanted, and then we learned to ask them for ‘side dishes’ and it was clear! I just pointed to which of the 8 or so dishes I wanted on my plate and it cost like 15 yuan. It was all fine and I went several times to find veggies because there were none in the market.
And then we went to the Muslim Quarter market literally every day at least once, for breakfast fruit and fresh juices, for fun tofu and potato things and endless noodles, and for dessert and incredible fresh coconut milk at night. I’m gonna share a lot of pictures now of everything amazing we ate.
One thing you can count on finding every few seconds is a potato-based stall and a tofu-based stall. I had 3 different amazing kinds of street tofu and they were all excellent, and they all cost 10 yuan each (like $1.50?) for a big cup of it. We also really enjoyed these street potatoes – they were super hot and super spicy but really incredible.
this tofu was one of the spiciest things I’ve ever eaten
that is, until I ate this tofu
…and then this one
The market is also a world-class location for eating carbs. We had noodles! We had bread! Then we had more noodles! And more bread! Luckily, Xi’an famous noodle dishes are often just the sesame noodle variety, so they will be vegan. The noodle stalls that will add meat are easy to clearly see since you watch everyone make your food.
good cheap bread!
But my favorite part had to be all the incredible fresh fruit and the juices juiced from them. Oh man, the fruit in China has been amazing and the market was overflowing with it. I especially loved the cup of fresh jackfruit! In the mad takeover of the cooked-jackfruit-tastes-like-pulled-pork discovery in the vegan world, I’d forgotten that the fruit itself is so good. And pomegranates! Sooo much pomegranate abounded everywhere we looked it was glorrrrious.
The watermelon is sooo good out here! And this fruit in the cup looked like cherries but tasted like grapes so we called them chapes
For the first time, there were actually vegan options for dessert! First up is this glutinous rice patty on a stick that is dipped in tamarind paste and/or other jams (there’s an assortment if you want to dip) and crushed nuts. Pretty good! Although it is kind of bland in the center (it’s a lot of rice!) so I recommend covering it in as much crap as possible. There’s a lot of glutinous rice stuff around, including a big yellow cake-looking thing that is cut into slices – these are literally every 5 seconds around the city center. Fortunately, it’s just more glutinous rice with a slight covering of slightly sweet osmanthus paste (that’s a fruit? I think? that is huge here?), so it is vegan, but unfortunately, it’s just a big slab of unsweetened glutinous rice so is not at all worth it.
Next is the thing I’m prettttty sure is vegan – the persimmon donuts. We showed one of the ladies making them the words for ‘egg’ and ‘milk’ and asked if they were in them, and she shook her head no, and clearly understood, so I am kiiiind of confident that that was the truth. The ones pictured at the pretty stall below are the best ones, with three different fillings – a tamarindish one, a peanutty one, and a maybe jaggery? Who even knows. The consistency is very much like mashed sweet potato, not a bread-y donut, which made me feel better about the possibility of it being vegan. They were really good, especially hot, and especially if you get a lot of the filling in yours.
But maybe the very best thing in the whole market is the fresh coconut milk. Erma p, it was SOOO DELICIOUS! More delicious than the So Delicious brand! Oh man I wish I could get one now.
Honestly the food in Xi’an was the best part of our time in the city! I really had no idea until Jojo at veganinbrighton told me! I’d been worrying about finding anything at all and she was like, um, dude. I never would have thought the food would be so fun and the thing I was most excited for – the Terra Cotta Warriors – would be simply good and not amazing.
I leave you, as usual, with amazingly ridiculous things we saw around Xi’an, including restaurant names, song lyrics as a store name, and the weirdest thing in any Apple store ever in the history of the world.
Shanghai, China: Why is Chinese London So Crowded…AND SO HOT?
Whenever I talk about Shanghai, I sound like Stefon. “China’s hottest city is…Shanghai. It has everything – street misters, yogurt jars, film noir, unidentifiable meat on sticks, toon bags – it’s that thing where they stuff a handful of toon into an edible sac and you try to eat the whole thing without choking.” And I mean ‘hottest city’ in all the possible ways. Shanghai was so cool and fancy and swanky, well, most of it. It had an incredible skyline that we could sometimes see through the smog, and the fanciest luxury stores and air conditioned malls EVERYWHERE. And, also, it was the hottest I’ve ever been. In fact, Shanghai was experiencing a heat wave of temperatures the highest they’ve been there in 140 years – just in time for us! It was rough. But, fortunately, the city has so much to offer that it was able to break through our sweat-fueled crankiness and impress us. Screw the Ozdust Ballroom; Shanghai is China’s most swankified place in town.
View from the Bund, of Pudong the financial center across the river
Because of all the big buildings, the excited commotion of a finance city, all the busy people, and all the English spoken, we immediately felt like we were in London. Out of everywhere we’ve been in the past two months, Shanghai is for sure the most Londrish. It was nice to feel a little at home. It was sort of welcoming! Like a big sweaty pollution-filled hug from people who smell extra terrible from the heat. Speaking of that heat, the over-100-degrees-Fahrenheit-every-day heat with high humidity so I look like Monica in Barbados just permanently now, it was rough. Luckily, like most big Asian cities, there are malls EVERYWHERE. I know the western among you are like ugh malls are trash. Yeah maybe in America, but in Asia? They have a very important purpose, and that is for respite from excruciating heat. Air-conditioned, bubble tea filled respite. Yes, there are malls in Shanghai, like in Beijing and Bangkok, seemingly on every corner, and we needed to go into every single one for a break. We’d struggle to walk a block while drinking a gallon of water, and then stop in the AC and find bubble tea (I’m obsessed). Then we’d struggle through the next block and go into the next mall to find another water bottle. Lather rinse repeat.
Shanghai was ready for this heat though, well, thanks to Pepsi, because as we started our walk down The Bund from our hotel, we passed the first item on the Stefon list:
and what about that fiiiiine miister
WATER MISTERS! The photo didn’t capture it, but the top section is shooting out mist to cool off those walking by. Such a great idea!
Our first order of business was indeed walking down The Bund, the famous river-adjacent street that was once the city’s Wall Street, where all the banks had grand historic buildings and is now filled with luxury brand stores. The water in the few convenience stores on the Bund is COSTLY, which says a great deal at least to me. One side of the Bund houses all the historic buildings, most of which have plaques sharing when in the grand old times this or that bank set up shop in what is now a fancy hotel or a Gucci. The other side is the Huangpu river and the view shared above, the famous skyline of Pudong, which has now taken over as the Wall Street-y section.
We decided after enough heatstroke-walking to get on the ferry to cross the river and go check out Pudong. A ferry ride seems like an appropriate early activity to see more of a city! There are of course expensive tourist boats that will take you cruising along the river, but, here’s a tip, if you just want to hop over to the other side of the city, there’s a regular commuter ferry that takes like 15 minutes and costs only 2 RMB! That’s like a quarter! Cheapest transportation I’ve ever encountered. I love loved the warning sign outside the non-tourist (but still fine for tourists to take) ferry.
For 2 yuan, it was as much tourist sightseeing as I needed! The windows were pretty grimy so the pictures of the city from the boat are blurry, but hey, it was fine. We got there.
Blursula through the window of the ferry
We decided to lose all our street cred from taking the commuter ferry and instead become full-on tourists by visiting the Shanghai Tower, the tallest building in China and, at least in my opinion, the tallest building in the world. Why in my opinion, you are probably wondering? At 121 stories and 632 meters tall, the Shanghai Tower comes in second in the world rankings only to the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. BUT, like most megatall buildings, the top of the Burj, the tip of its height, narrows into a spire! SPIRES DON’T COUNT FOR ME. It’s SO cheating to build a tall building and then after you build actually usable space to go wait but I wanna win the competition, so here’s a 100 foot long metal rod to increase my numbers. DISQUALIFIED. The Shanghai Tower actually has the highest occupied floor in the world, which is way more impressive to me than all these buildings counting the height of their antennae and thin little completely unoccupied towers and stuff. No dice, Burjess Meredith!
How cool is this building? The whole body of it twists and turns in a corkscrew, which is so impressive. This shape actually helps save $58 million USD in construction costs because it reduces wind loads, whatever the crap that means. Also, using all the glass (the entire outer skin is glass) saves energy costs because it allows in so much sunlight. It was designed by a US architecture firm. Good job America! I love that the skyscraper next to it looks like a baby in comparison. Tickets up to the observation deck are very expensive, if I recall correctly 180 RMB each, so about $25, which is normal for such a sight in the USA but like the most expensive activity in months for us! We wavered for a minute on whether to get them, but considering this is like A Big Deal and supposably totally worth it, we went for it and I’m so glad we did! I usually get so scared of heights (I almost passed out at the Sear’s Tower (I refuse to change the name) when I stood on the glass floor) but I felt very safe in this one. Oh also, you can pay extra to get in through the Fast Track line. Do that at Disneyworld or whatever. Don’t do it here. We went at like 2pm right in the middle of the busiest tourist season (July-August) and no one was in front of us in the regular line.
Not only does the Shanghai Tower have the highest occupied floor in the world, but it also has the fastest elevator in the world, designed by Mitsubishi, and the world’s tallest single-lift elevator. I don’t know how they are different, but they are. ALSO, most importantly for tourists, it has the world’s highest skydeck, or observation deck! Amazingggg.
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That elevator is NO JOKE. Before I even realized we were moving, I noticed the screen and saw we were already at Floor 60. You don’t feel ANYTHING. Then I blinked and we went another 50 floors in an INSTANT. Now that is Japanese brilliance.
the sign on the escalator as you go down to the lift (kind of counterproductive but whatevs)
Once we got off the elevator at the observation deck, we were struck by the brightness and cleanliness of the big, bright space. We were so excited that we had such a sunny day for our viewing pleasure, and we made our way towards the big glass windows encircling the whole space aaaaand saw that we were oh yeah still in China and it was all smog all the time.
On A Clear Day You Can See FourFeetInFrontOfYou
I’m picking the very best of our pictures to share, because some of the sides were just full on fogginess. I wasn’t upset though! It’s not like we had bad luck that day, that’s just how it is! And we still got to see a good amount, and it was so cool. It’s just, you know, Shanghai abruptly ends! Shrug emoji!
From one side, you look straight down into the bottle-opener section of Shanghai’s other famous megatall observation tower, the Shanghai World Financial Center. The tickets to go to that building’s observation deck cost the same as the tickets for the Shanghai Tower, which seems silly considering how much higher, and cooler, it is from the Tower. I mean not to crap on the Financial Center, I’m sure you are very important, but if you are going to go up one Shanghai building, do the big one, right?
looking down onto the bottle opener/Shanghai World Financial Center
Around the bend of the observation deck, you run into a set of stairs going up to ANOTHER floor of observing! We kept getting higher! I’m king of the world!
We were also super hungry – we hadn’t eaten all day because HEAT but now it was like 4pm. Luckily, because this is Shanghai, the bottom floors of the Tower composed a retail space with lots of food court spaces. They even had a Bassett’s ice cream cart, straight out of the Northeast USA! I found a ready-made salad place that I didn’t realize wouldn’t make new ones, so when I asked for the vegetarian one with no egg, they just took the egg out of the container. Lol. Oh well, roll with the things like this that happen while traveling, and give the parts that were touching the egg to the husband.
It was a really good salad! Full of purple sweet potato and quinoa and pumpkin and falafel-pretenders and lettuce! I was so excited to have a good salad since we had just gotten off a train that very morning and travel makes me crave lettuce and vegetables.
Oh, side note, that train, from Beijing to Shanghai! I didn’t write a diary entry because it was just midnight to 8am. It was the fanciest train since St. Petersburg, very nice and clean, not smoky, and completely different from the other Chinese trains. They had slippers for everyone in plastic wrap! Each bed had a TV on the wall! If you book Chinese trains, try to get the G trains! (I think this is our only G, so sad.) So nice! BUT. But. We had the beds that were very first in our carriage, along the wall next to the door of the car. And for some reason, that means that the bones of the train, whatever fills the walls on those things, continued under our beds. So we didn’t have storage! There was nothing under my bottom bunk but like metal! So infuriating, we were the people with the most luggage on board! Luckily, the other people in our cabin didn’t have much so we stored under their beds. Not so luckily, one of those people had a child. See, in China, there are no laws, and so people do not buy seats or beds on trains for their children. (Oh is there a doozy of a story in this fashion coming soon.) So instead of sharing with two other people, we were sharing with three. (We also heard horror stories about how Chinese couples often don’t buy two beds but will share one tiny bed, which is much worse and super inconsiderate to force a whole nother adult into a train compartment.) But the young man who was in the other bed was NOT excited to be forced to sleep with a baby, so when he realized that, he peaced out! I guess he got the conductor to find him a new spot because we didn’t see him again. The baby was fine though. Cute! He made some noise in the night but like, so do I. That’s all I have to say about that.
I’m going to do a separate food post for Shanghai, but I’m sharing the Tower food court salad because it’s part of that sight and just makes sense. Guess what else that food court had? BUBBLE TEA! My favorite thing to drink after water! Weirdly, Shanghai..ians favorite drink is neither of those. Instead, you will see literally every single Chinese person on the street – in this heat – drinking little pots of white yogurt with a straw. Usually room temperature. SO GROSS. IT’S HOT OUT AND YOU’RE DRINKING YOGURT? MILK IS A BAD CHOICE! The yogurt pots are on display in every single food cart and shop window you pass all over town. It’s so weird.
The Shanghai Museum is shaped like a Chinese ding, a cauldron with three legs, I assume for cooking
Another day, we went to the Shanghai Museum, which our guide book highly recommended. The book said you could spend a whole day there, or at least a half day, which sounds like my nightmare and I was like hellll nooo but then I remembered that my husband likes to see everything in a museum so we were indeed there for an ungodly amount of time. Luckily, it was pretty interesting. There’s a bronze gallery, a sculpture gallery, a calligraphy gallery, a traditional furniture gallery, a coin gallery, a ceramics gallery, and more over four floors. Best of all, it pulls a London and is free! You have to wait in a long security line though to get in, and in the heat it was brutal. But, like malls, I learned that the best thing about museums (besides learning, I guessss) is that it’s a break from the heat! Hooray for air conditioning. Actually, the Shanghai museum was SO cold that I had to put a long sleeve shirt on! All this constant variation between the intolerable heat and the frigidness of air con is going to give me hypothermia.
Hilariously, my favorite section of this museum covering so much of Chinese culture and history was…the special exhibit sent from Hungary on Princess Sissy. Sorrynotsorry.
I also enjoyed some of the thousands-of-years-old Buddhist sculpture findings, like this cool slab.
slab fairy goddess
Getting to the museum is a bit frustrating because of police barricades all over People’s Square. You can’t just find the museum and head towards it. You get into the squarea around it by finding the correct underpass tunnel instead of just, like, walking above ground. Oh China. It was so annoying in this brutal heat to have to do so much extra walking but it was a very nice area, with big parks and nice views and trees and, all over Shanghai and actually most of China, recycling and garbage bins!
The coolest part of Shanghai (not temperature cool…it was never not sweltering, even in the middle of the night) was walking along the Bund at night and seeing the cool skyline of Pudong all lit up in its bright neon. It’s always incredibly crowded – 25 million people just living there, guys, not even counting visitors – but it’s worth it to enjoy the view.
We got to enjoy this view every night because our hotel was at the top of the Bund. We chose the Astor House Hotel because it is an important old historic building with lots of interesting history in its ballrooms and staircases. However, the oldness comes through, and it’s very clear that it was a luxury place one day, but one day long ago. The room was beautiful and comfortable and clean, but the hotel itself shows its age and is now very much a hotel primarily for domestic Chinese travelers, not international visitors. This was evident by the fact that, despite ostensibly speaking English, the hotel staff was impossible to communicate with. It was very frustrating. Incredibly, in our next stop, Nanxun, we stayed in a lovely boutique hotel where not one person in the whole town spoke English, let alone in our hotel, yet communicating solely via Google translate went much more smoothly and professionally than our attempts with the Astor House staff – which should not be the case for a place pretending to be a top hotel. Most of the time, every staff member on the floor had a badge that read ‘Trainee’, and they had no idea what they were doing. The lobby was chaos 100% of the time. Worst of all, the lobby had a grand cafe seating area that was very nice – but you couldn’t sit there unless you were ordering something. In the lobby! The only other seats for paying guests were just wooden chairs in a far corner by the front door, with no table or anything. Shame! Thank goodness we didn’t pay as much as the book says it costs. It wasn’t that bad for the price.
But the location was good, because it led us through the Bund all the time. One night on our walk home, we stopped at the other historic old hotel, the Fairmount Peace Hotel, which really has that 1930s Shanghai feel, that film noirishness, complete with a hallway of movie posters with all the movies about that era, including a family favorite:
Every night, the Fairmount has live jazz, but we didn’t realize that cover charge was exorbitant, so we left and went to the other live jazz show at the Peninsula Hotel, which just charges you for drinks and seemed just as good. They did the theme song from Coupling and I was soo excited I was singing along without realizing! I had these weird cranberry soda, white chocolate (sugar syrup), and black pepper (I know!) concoction that was really good!
As for other entertainment, I was gung-ho on seeing some Shanghai Acrobats, which I knew were special and unique and a must-see in Shanghai. The most recommended theatre for an acrobatic show was the Shanghai Centre Theatre, at the Shanghai Centre on West Nanjing Road. Tickets were expensive, like $40 or more, but we figured it would be worth it for some flying through the air with the greatest of ease and what not! But actually, I can’t recommend this show at all. It’s the biggest, most well known one, but as such it caters to tourists, and to the lowest common denominator involved, so it was dumbed down quite a bit and had like, 2 acts out of 8 or 9 that were actually strong acrobatics. Maybe 8 minutes of the almost two hour show was actually the kind of amazing physicality I wanted to see. The rest included a guy using one of those toys where you like hold a stick between two other sticks? That people do like on street corners? Another was a juggler. I mean it was impressive juggling but it was still juggling, and I didn’t pay for that. Another featured men throwing heavy vases and catching them with their ankle-crooks or necks or the tops of their heads, which the audience loooved and yes is impressive but again IS NOT ACROBATICS. The worst though, the thing that made me furious, was the magician. His main schtick? Turning everything into doves. He had five live doves hidden on him for that routine, and I think we all know what happens to doves in stupid shitty magic acts like that. I’m furious still and I have my strongly worded email to the theatre company ready to go if I can find out how to contact them.
But those two actual acrobatic acts were indeed amazing. One was two men doing a partner routine full of handstands on top of each other that were mind-blowing enough but that culminated with one holding the other just by the head, just with his hand. I mean. HOW. The other impressive one was a woman and man doing a very sexually charged routine on a pole, which was hilarious because 90% of the audience was children, but it was like a ballet, clearly telling a story and powerfully so. They did a lot of that ahhh-I’m-slipping-down-the-pole-I’m-gonna-crash-into-the-ground-JUST-KIDDING-I-STOPPED-MYSELF-WITH-MY-QUADS-AN-INCH-ABOVE-GROUND stuff. So I’m really glad I got to see those two amazing bits. I just wish the whole show was that and not stupid touristy drivel.
Speaking of stupid touristy drivel, we were seated next to an older New Zealand man and we chatted for a little before the show started. He asked us how we ended up here, and I proceeded to share every last detail about our trip – ‘we live in London and we flew to Helsinki and we took the Trans Mongolian train route through Russia and saw a lot of Russia and Siberia then we toured Mongolia and then we ended that train route in Beijing and we saw Beijing and now we’re in Shanghai also I had a UTI and diarrhea in Mongolia and my favorite thing is Broadway and puppies and I really love puppies and I really need to wash my hair tonight.’ Okay I didn’t say all of that stuff but it sure felt like it when I finished talking about our route, and his response was, “I meant how did you choose to see this show.”
I died, I am dead now.
The best part about the show was not even those two good bits though. It was the theatre’s location in the fancy pants Centre that we lovingly referred to as Expat Centre. It had EVERYTHING you could possibly want as an expat living in Shanghai, and I think that’s where lots of them do indeed live. First of all, the main part of the Centre is not the theatre, but is the giant Ritz Carlton Hotel – a beautiful fancy hotel (I used their bathroom of course) but it also has two residence blocks attached! Can you imagine being an expat in Shanghai and living in the Ritz residence building? Dayummm son! Okay, so not only is there that, but in the basement of the whole place is a fancy pants supermarket with all kinds of imported recognizable goods, and a Godiva ice cream stand. In the market. And a lot of fresh fruit and even green juice! Then, on one side of the Centre, is a Starbucks, several legit tea shops and juice stands, many fancy Chinese restaurants, many casual and good-looking Chinese and non-Chinese restaurants, a paella cafe, A VEGAN RESTAURANT (next post), an HSBC (our bank), a Parkway Health Clinic – the expat-focused medical practice I went to in Beijing!, a Parkway Health DENTAL Clinic, a massage parlor, a gym, literally everything you could want. If I lived there I would never leave the complex. I’d never have to! It was hilarious. Every corner we turned we’d find something else that would make us thing we were in London.
Not too far in the grand scheme of things (literally and figuratively) from Expat Centre was Xintiandi, an outdoor shopping complex that is suuper fancy. It’s like Rodeo Drive or something, a totally Westernized outdoor mall sort of thing but housed in beautiful old buildings reminiscent of Shanghai’s past. It’s pedestrianized as well as totally Westernized, with craft beer gardens on every corner, all the recognizable shops, Starbucks on every block as is the custom in China, and a complex-wide wifi (that I think only works on Chinese numbers, like most public networks here (and in Russia) that require you to put in a phone number to connect. Not a fan!). We didn’t spend too much time there since we weren’t shopping, and once you see the cool juxtaposition of modern brand shops being house in historic buildings, you get the point, but still it was cool to see. My favorite part is that pets are allowed, but as you can see in the picture above, they MUST be in carriages! What! Not even like, oh if your pet gets tired here’s a baby carriage for them. No, they MUST be in baby carriages. Oh China!
So, we really enjoyed our time in Shanghai overall, despite the heat, though we didn’t do that much in our limited time. We both agreed that we would happily (and relatively easily) return here from London in the future, if for no other reason than the food. The food was amaaazing. That’s the next post! You’ll have to read that one to find out what toon bags are!
