Xi’an Great Mosque, Shadow play, Xi’an museum
Next day spent the morning doing arrangements for our next stop, Hohhot in Inner Mongolia.
In the afternoon, we went back to the Muslim quarter market to look around and shop for some small souvenirs. We found some little things that don’t take up a lot of space. Towards the evening we went to visit the Xi’an Great Mosque. The cashier wanted to charge full price tickets for the kids, and they were no children tickets. So we decided I will go in check out the place. The man in the entrance made sign that the kids could go in (with no tickets) so I took A with me. The mosque was impressive and really special. It was following more the Chinese architectural plan (successive courtyards), ending with the prayer hall, so it wasn’t like a ‘usual’ mosque like in the Middle East. The mosque is oriented to the West, towards Mecca.
The complex had a very nice atmosphere. I told Y he had to go in as well, because it is really worth it. He took the other kids in and he was very impressed by the mosque as well.
On our last day we went back again to the cultural centre next to the Small Goose pagoda, to see a shadow play.
The show was in Chinese, but there was a screen with subtitles, which had English and French translation, so the kids were able to read and understand what was being said. The show was only about 15 minutes long and had a couple of interesting effects, like at one point, a character was smoking and you could see the shadow of the smoke coming out of its mouth. The story was very simple. The kids were not too impressed by the play itself, but they found it interesting as an experience, because they are still mentioning it occasionally. There was also a short demonstration of a more traditional puppeteer with a marionette. I was somewhat disappointed, because I have seen better shadow plays. After the show we walked around in the cultural centre and looked into the artist studios and galleries and bought a couple of small things.
After that we went to the Xi’an museum and went through it quite quickly. The building was nice, but we didn’t find the exhibits that interesting. I think after the Shanghai museum, we had some higher expectations.
We also wanted to check out Xi’an’s antique market. We walked around in the area it was supposed to be, but we never really found it. We did came about another nice area, with nice restaurants, but we never figured out what it actually was.
We headed back to the hostel to get our stuff, and headed to the train station. This time we took a hard sleeper, as we bought the tickets too late, the soft sleepers were sold out. Hard sleepers have no private cabins, just open compartments with six beds in each. We were not impressed. The sheets were already used and one of them was really dirty, so we had to ask to change for a clean one (which they did). During our second trip to China more than a month later, we actually realized that this line is one of the longest ones: it runs from Kunming in south China, to Hohhot, Inner Mongolia in the north, a ride that takes nearly three days. That explains why the sheets were already slept in…
