Rice is Nice

Today was our last day in Xi'an. So we went to see the Shaanxi Provincial Museum, which is written of so highly. It was OK. Lots of pottery and farming implements organized by dynasties, which were interesting enough. But it's not well curated, I guess, and like everything else in China, parts are closed down for renovation.

We then made a beeline for the main mosque, which is supposed to be the biggest in China. It looks more like a Chinese temple than what we think of a mosque. And it was not exceptionally big. But it was peaceful, and pretty in a sort of run-down way. I found this surprising, because Xi'an has a large Hui (Chinese Muslim, and I think it's more of a religious distinction than an ethnic one) population. I guess few of them actually show up to pray. We then wandered the streets of the Muslim Quarter, which are smaller and older than most of Xi'an's streets. One of my guidebooks said that a restaurant with Arabic script above the door can generally be trusted to be more sanitary than your run-of-the-mill Chinese restaurant. Hell no! The Muslim Quarter was a dense warren of rotting hunks of meat and the flies that love them. Many baked items were on display, and I partook of a few, but they were nothing special and the overwhelming smell of decaying beef and lamb kind of ruined my appetite. Yeah, the streets are small and windy, but sorry, Hui people, that neighborhood is off-putting.

Prayer schedule at Xi'an mosque

We went to the train station, avoided the throng of people shoving their way upstairs onto the platform by using a "soft sleeper" entrance, and boarded our train to Chongqing. It was obvious that the lady in our sleeping car was not thrilled to see us, but she was polite enough. And the fourth, and latest-arriving, cabin-mate was a retired translator. He translated manuals (I imagine for toasters and random things) from Chinese into English. So we talked for a while, mostly about how shocking, almost offensive (in his mind), it is that Americans eat sweet things for breakfast.