Day 242 (China): rest day in Xian (ticket, baggage allowance and the like)

A short night of sorts and I so wanted to rest up. I couldn’t sleep well … maybe it was the coffee that I usually don’t drink but didn’t feel that I should refuse yesterday. No laundry at the hotel and I didn’t feel like looking around for a place so I did it myself and then set out to take a look at the city.

There were even more hairdressers than I thought and many, many modern buildings that are supposed to look old. Xian strikes me - at least in the center and the main roads - as a modern place and one that has shed part of what I assume is its old glory. Once you wonder into the side streets things tend to get a lot better though.

But I had two missions today: get new spokes just in case and look into return flights. The first one was easy (though the length wasn’t exactly what I was looking for, but it was within range), the second wasn’t. I was sent from this place to the next and finally got to a place that would do the booking on the spot. Good. What should have taken 15 or 30 minutes was in the end a three-hour affair. No fewer than six people handled the issue. Now, understand that Xian gets a lot of tourist traffic and this was supposed to be the place where the foreigners usually go. One guy spoke broken English, everything was complicated … even questions as to whether what the situation was to fly back from Shanghai instead of Beijing caused concern. And took a long time to answer. And I got a total of six answers as to whether I can take the bike on the plane. From: sure, no problem to everything over 20kg will be 35EUR/kg and no oversize boxes. We shall see what happens.

So, after two hours we were set. I plunked down my credit card and said here you go. The card didn’t go through they said. Then they figured out that they used the wrong slot on the machine. Only one person in the office was allowed to use this machine and she didn’t have a clue. It was classic. All I wanted was a ticket. In the end I went to an ATM and got cash out without a hitch. This meant that the day was shot really.

With the ticket and the spokes secured I didn’t care much though. Things were settled and I am bound to fly out just after mid-December. Updating the website and just relaxing was the order for the remainder of the day.

Here is the last picture (and this is best viewed large, so click on it and then the plus icon on top of the picture).