Travel Nightmares and Intriques

Traveling always involves a few headaches: delayed flights; traffic jams; travel buddies who suddenly become arch enemies when finding themselves in a room with four other girls and one bathroom.

Since early March, I have researched, organized, compared, and confirmed the cross-China trip with two of my childhood friends to the point that I actually used grading as a break.

Even with as meticulously thought-out plans, problems arise that leave people racing through airports or spending the night with their head down on the bathroom floor, wishing that they had remembered to pack stronger upset stomach medicine.

We were already tired when we reached our guesthouse in Xi'an. I spend weeks looking for this hotel alone since I did not like any of the standard hotels in the ancient city.

The guesthouse that we reserved used to be a former emperor's brother's house and is a beautiful traditional stone building with three internal courtuards. The residence had only been open as a guesthouse for a year and five days (according to the manager, who I got to know really well before we left Xi'an).

We checked in, planning to flop our bags down and grab dinner before heading to bed early. I was already thinking about how nice it would be to relax as the front desk receptionist handed me our key and told me that we had a four bed room without a bathroom. I halted my hand midgrab; I reserved a three bed room with a bathroom and confirmed it...twice.

The receptionist's response was, "We held your room until today. The family staying in the room couldn't get train tickets and wanted to stay another night."

I dealt with the isses without anyone at the hotel losing face and without being anything but respectful and patient; however, when told over and over again that they reserved the room until today and that excuse expected to allieviate all our concerns was a little trying.

It took two hours. The manager was called. The "Big Boss" was called. Half a dozen other hotels and hostels were called. The manager ended up paying the difference between what we owed for our reserved room (up until that day)and two rooms in a hotel nearby for the first night in Xi'an. The second night we returned to the guesthouse and received the penthouse family suite with the bedroom on the vaulted second story. Not bad for never raising my voice.

On many occasions Chinese tour groups have been a major obstacle for my China teacher friends' travel experiences (flashback to Huangshan); however, we only came to Xi'an to see the Terra Cotta Warriors and joined a tour through our guesthouse to do it.

The unscheduled visit to the extinct for 6,000 years Banpo camp was interesting, mostly because we went there first in the morning. The tourist trap banquet was not amusing at all. The foor was a step-up from Chinese airplane food but not much more. The drinks were hot: hot straight-from-powder orange juice; hot straight-from-powder corn juice; hot straight-from-powder watermelon juice. The temperature forced tourists to pay fifteen yuan for a cold drink as the waitresses made abundantly clear. Ours kept yelling "cold" in Chinese at me when I bulked at the price. The Chinese tourism industry still hasn't quite mastered the art of subtlty in some cases.

The town outside the Terra Cotta Warriors is also bazaar. The government took the land from the farmers who discovered the "eighth wonder of the world", and it built the farmers a modern town to make up for the land-grab for historical significance. The townhouse subdivision was a Chinese fascade slapped on a Western design. Take away the Qing era roofs with dragon corner statues and throw on some shutters and the neighborhood would fit in comfortably in suburbia, USA. The attached garages were particularly out of place.

The town square with its water fatures was in the wrong continent. Put in a few more trees and take out the impromptu statue of the Beijing Olympics characters, and it could have been Brunswick or any other small town in the midwest.

The solitude of the town gave it an eerie quality. The new buildings stood empty with a dust film on all the windows. The scattering of vendors set up small roll-away stands along the main walking street while the store fronts on either side were vacent. I felt like I entered an apocalypic zombie movie but instead of the undead flying through store windows and flooding the town square, ghost of the Terra Cotta Warriors would tackle us and demand their terra cotta memorabilia back.

The Terra Cotta Warriors were fascinating, especially how much of the site still hasn't been unearthed. Of course, the automatic crossbow booby-traps and mercury gas are effecient deterents against opening the emperor's tomb.

Our Xi'an trip ended as borderline disasterous as it began. Our flight times changed last week, and I confusingly thought we were taking the later flight. I happened to check the times at noon and realized that our flight left at 1:40PM. The airport was fifty minutes away. We made our flight and so did our bags, which is lucky because I did not want to use my diplomatic calm to handle negotiating another flight. Hopefully my friends and I have fulfilled our quota on travel nightmares, and the rest of our trip will run smoothly.