Waiting for Xuzhou

School children play in the streets of Hefei. Tomorrow is the first day of the May holidays in China.

I'm asked now and then -- by the Chinese people we encounter here and by my friends and family back home -- how we manage to get around China without a tour guide and without a real comprehension of the written or spoken language. Well, it's not always that easy; we spend a good bit of time just figuring out how to get from place to place. While I can imagine that a lot of people would find that aggrivating, I actually find it rather interesting and enjoyable. Still, from time to time there are considerable misunderstandings, which generally result in a lot of puzzled looks -- but on some occasions great heaves of laughter. For example:

We're in Hefei today, but tomorrow we want to take the bus to Xuzhou, where supposedly the second largest terracota army in China exists. I say supposedly because the city is not listed in my Lonely Planet guide at all, although it has fairly prominent mention in my friend Thomas' German-language book. Anyway, because it's always difficult to secure tickets, we try to get a friend or acquiantance to write on a slip of paper where we're going, which we hand to the booking office clerk.

So anyway, trying to get bus tickets to Xuzhou, I handed such a slip of paper to a couple of clerks at our hotel, who gave me some very strange looks and repeated "Xi'an." Only then did my friend Thomas suggest that perhaps what was written on our slip was actually a bit more specific than I'd thought. It seems our friend wrote "I'd like to see the terracota army in Xuzhou," which makes sense to us, but not to most people we've encountered, who assume that if we want to see the terracota army, we ought to be heading to Xi'an, which is 800 kilometers west of here. We might as well have asked to see the Forbidden City in Hong Kong.

Fortunately, it looks like we've managed it... the hotel staff is working on our request right now and told us to check back with them this afternoon. So hopefully tomorrow or the day after I'll be able to tell you about the second most famous terracotta army in China -- unless we end up on the wrong bus, in which case I might be able to tell you about the real thing.