trouble in xian

did you ever see, or have you ever read, "the world according to garp?" in the novel and the movie, garp, the main character (played brilliantly by robin williams) persuades his wife to buy a house that a small cessna airplane has just crashed into. "this house has been pre-disastered," he tells her. "what are the chances of ANOTHER plane striking this place?"

well, this trip around the world has been a little bit like that - interestingly bad things keep happening (to each and every member of the traveling party), but i still believe that everything will turn out okay. otherwise, i'd pack it up, pack it in, and return home right now.

so let's recap: annette had massive diarrhea (to put it bluntly, and why not this far into the game) for about a week, which greatly distracted her from the beauty and splendor of siberia. i had my iPod, GameBoy, camera, and travel clock stolen from my train compartment somewhere around ulan-ude, russia, which allowed me to concentrate a lot more on the beauty and splendor of siberia, although without an appropriate soundtrack blaring in my ears. amanda and i both got violently ill, threw up repeatedly, and spent days in our beds in our hotel rooms. i tripped and fell not once, but twice (once in a heat-induced daze as we trudged slowly towards a taxi across a dusty parking lot in mongolia, the other in the slick mud after a heavy rain in pingyao, china). the first fall resulted in a thick scab the size of four postage stamps on my right knee and some loose cartilage, it feels like, in my left knee; the second fall re-opened the injury on the right knee just as it was almost healed.

but it's got to get better from here, right? damn straight.

but first, it got a little worse.

we had a great time in pingyao, but that was not enough to keep my mom in asia. she had decided to come on this trip a few months ago, visions of the great wall and the terracota warriors and angkor wat dancing in her head. the first two of those were great - i've already described the fun we had at the great wall and an account of the terracota warriors is forthcoming - but she won't be around to see angkor wat, because a week in beijing was enough to convince mom to forget about the plane tickets she already has and book some to get home ASAP. it was a combination of things, she told me: the crowds, the challenges of traveling in a difficult country like china, and, more than anything, the general feeling that she didn't belong in the orient.

i started out trying to convince her that southeast asia was totally different than china, that it would be more relaxing in thailand, more kick-back, etc., but talking with amanda and mom's continued lack of fun made my attempts half-hearted, so i knew it would be for the best last week in pingyao when we sat down in an internet cafe and booked a flight home from bangkok to ontario via taiwan and los angeles.

i was bummed, i must admit, for i wanted her to have a great time more than anything - to see the great things i've spoken of and photographed, to share in the same exhilirations i've felt - but the decision to help her get home (to her husband, gene, who she missed incredibly from the time her plane took off from america) was made all the easier when i saw that she was spending so much of her time not having a great time.

we booked the tickets for her to leave from bangkok on sunday morning and set out from pingyao to xian via an overnight train on thursday night. this train trip was infinitely better than the horrendous, cramped, hot, stinky, third-class train from beijing to pingyao had been. it was a second-class hard sleeper train, with six bunks in each little open-air section, stacked three-high. i spent most of the first few hours of the trip, which began at 8 p.m., talking to a group of chinese men and women who were all teachers on a vacation retreat to pingyao, and my snoring, in the words of one of them, "shook the train" as we rolled down the track, i was informed the next morning.

xian was cool. we took an all-day tour out to the terracota warriors, which were made like eight billion years ago to protect an ancient emporer in the afterlife. each of the life-size figures has a different facial expression. they were discovered, buried underground in an area the size of about three football fields, by some chinese farmers in 1974. now, a giant hangar-type building has been constructed over the terracota warriors, and tourist after tourist goes through and checks them out, in awe of the scale and splendor and artistic skill necessary to create such a display.

amanda and i were particularly impressed with how there were special VIP photo sections available, where, for extra yuan, you could get much closer to the warriors and get better photos. "won't you feel sad if you get home and didn't get the picture you wanted because you didn't pay the money?" a sign near one of the VIP sections asked. i've got to give it to those chinese: they are really embracing capitalism!

we wandered through the three hangars, looked at stuff, and then wandered back 15 minutes to the bus parking lot, giving us ample opportunity to be hassled by stall after stall of merchanise hawkers. they could have built the parking lot right next to the hangars, but then we would have been denied the chance to (not) buy all the crap they were selling.

back at the guest house in xian, we were just getting ready for dinner and plotting out what time mom and i would have to leave for the airport the next morning when amanda discovered that she had (ominous music) lost her wallet!

so there it is: evil fate strikes again! she'd already been sick and throwing up, and now she was without credit cards or her ATM card, in frikkin' china! doh! but she stayed calm and i stayed calm (mom, eh, not so much with the calm...) and we discovered that she still had her passport (whew!) and, with a large loan from my mom and a small loan from me, would be okay until replacement cards could be issued.

we ate dinner and said our sad farewells. mom really, really enjoye getting to know amanda, who is one of my favorite people in the world, and i was sad to say goodbye to her as i sat packing my stuff in my room at half past midnight. she left, however, to go back to her room, and to prepare for the next day's journey, which would be taking her to a six-week kung fu school in a city somewhere south of beijing.

a little more than four hours later, i was awake, and i lugged my stuff into the guesthouse lobby at two minutes after 5 a.m. mom was already there - having been up and worrying all night about the flight to bangkok, and we set off in the dark rainyness of the pre-dawn chinese morning towards the airport and our flight to thailand.