[Itinerary Page]The Daily Diary of a Wandering Restaurateur
April 26 - Beijing to Xi'an
Usually when we travel we try to rent a house for a week or more, stay in one spot and just do day trips ... if we even leave the house at all. When we are more nomadic, at least we can toss everything in the car and not worry too much about packing and unpacking. This is pretty easy to do in Europe, but none of it applies in China.
Even if you could rent a car in China, I can promise you that it would be about the worst decision you could make. Not only are the cities a maze, not only are there several hundred thousand new drivers on the road with you, but you wouldn't be able to read most of the signs anyway! Fortunately, cabs are quite cheap and it is easy to hire a driver for the day if you want to travel to the outskirts without being herded along in a tour group.
Getting around in China, then -- involves flying, particularly when you are trying to cover sites as geographically separated as the itinerary we have set for ourselves. This means packing it all up neatly, getting to the airport early (it seems like they are all at least an hour outside of town), dealing with crowds and airport security ... all those hassles that may ultimately convince more people to stay home! In the end, getting from Point A to Point B will pretty much eat up a full day, even if the flight itself is only a couple of hours long.
This is a long way of saying that about all we managed to do today was to leave our hotel in Beijing around 8:15am and settle into our hotel in Xi'an (pronounced like "she-on") around 6:00pm. In between we had a two-hour flight on China Eastern!
That really made dinner our major event of the day. Dinner is always a good idea but often it is not much to write home about (or take photos of). I did, however, get a few interesting shots along the way, we did eat dinner at a very different sort of restaurant ... and Xi'an threw in a nice last-minute surprise.
The Pre-Shift of Your Dreams and Dinner in Xi'an
© 2008 Restaurant Doctor