A final look at Xian

Saturday, July 3 We had the morning to ourselves here in Xian. Some of us went to the mosque which is rather small, though more actively used than the Catholic Church we saw yesterday. I took a walk along the city walls which are some of the best preserved medieval walls in the world. I have to wonder if they are this will preserved or reconstructed, but it is hard to tell. There is surprisingly little corrosion of the bricks, which don't appear to be all that sturdy when you look at them up close, but perhaps that is because this is a drier climate so there would be less wear and tear. The total circumference is 17.8 kilometers. I didn't do the whole thing, but would have enjoyed it by bicycle. That's a challenge for some entrepreneur -- it would also spread out the tourists who naturally gather at the gates. There is a lot of dust in Xian from all the construction work. In our neighborhood -- the town center, they are laying huge, wide sidewalks which give a tremendous sense of prosperity to this city. We have run into more American tourists here which may reflect that we are getting closer to July and school is out, or just that this is such a popular site. Like every city, there are many projects under construction which completion dates on October 1, the fiftieth anniversary of Mao's revolution. It is hard to imagine what they will celebrate. They seem to have no sense of what kind of security the revolution wanted to promise. Public health care is coming to an end and the explanations you get here are "it was too expensive for the employers" or people who didn't have health insurance cheated and went in under assumed names. They have no notion of what an issue healthcare is for us. Mid-day we collected ourselves and headed for the airport and a rather quick ride to Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province. This area is higher and somehow I imagined it would be drier, but it has more the climate of the Pacific northwest. It is the starting point for most trips to Tibet, but our trip as a group will end here on Monday when most of the group will depart for an overnight in Hong Kong before heading back to the US. Two of us will fly back to Beijing and start new adventures. I am ready for the group experience to end. It has been a good way to get oriented, and to see a lot that I otherwise couldn't afford. It is a pleasant group and we have really gotten along amazingly well. On the other hand, being a group of 17 puts some definite limitations to any experience, so I will be glad to have more independence in my daily plans -- and more choices about when and where to eat. This morning it was raining again, and needless to say we were all a little depressed by that. We headed to another smaller city (only 375,000) about an hour and a half northwest of here, to look at some ancient flood control systems. None of us were terribly excited about this adventure in the rain, but it turned out to be quite interesting. According to our guide, the water diversion system which was designed 2020 years ago has saved the cities and farms in its area of either a flood or a serious drought. The basis of the system is an island which divides the water in two, with the one side heading straight for the Yangtze and the other going into irrigation canals. The curve of the riverbed determines that the water with the overcurrent (and less silt) heads for to the irrigation canal and that with the undercurrent heads downstream. We were taken to an explanation station which was in a lovely park that is clearly a local tourist area. We were the only western tourists we encountered all day and it was nice to be among Chinese tourists for a change. After visiting the explanatory display, we were taken to lunch in what appeared to be a resort for communist party members. I inferred that from the fact that the aesthetics were more in the tradition of soviet realism and the only souvenirs were inside a dark case, with no one appearing to want to sell us anything. After lunch we went to a temple built in honor of the emperor who commissioned the dam. Behind his statue was a second area with gold statues of the engineer and the engineer's wife. Most of us bought little souvenir carvings of the engineer, intrigued that for once he got top billing along with the emperor himself. At the base of the temple was a pedestrian suspension bridge which took you across to the critical island that separates the two portions of the river. It has been developed as a tourist site and there were lots of families and young couples enjoying the picturesque mountains on both sides of the river. By this point the rain had also stopped, so we could enjoy being out of doors and assisting the Chinese tourists by taking photos of their family groups on the bridge. On the way back to Chengdu we stopped to visit a village -- along the lines of the village we visited outside of Xian. This time there was a great deal of mud to negotiate and we were all clumped together. I felt sort of awkward -- the whole group of us assembled in front of 15 or so villagers. I am not sure where the young children were -- only the toddlers were in evidence, and we ended up loading them down with more candy and pencils than their little fists could hold. Regardless of how awkward we looked, we certainly provided that village with entertainment for weeks to come, and got back here in time to see Chengdu in daylight.