life in the second tier

i just got back to beijing from xi’an, where i was doing research for our second tier city reports. some may remember i have actually been there before, and it was interesting going back not as a tourist. i think the disparity is especially striking in xi'an, because the nearby terracotta warriors make it one of the stops on almost every standard china tour. as a tourist, you basically only get a glimpse of your hotel, the city wall and the area around the drum and bell towers in the center of town, though depending on your budget you may also see the train station and the numerous prostitutes around the cheap hotels.

i also lucked out in that my colleague who accompanied me is from xi'an originally, which meant that two of the three nights i was there i got to meet various members of her family, and got the classic china treat of being almost forcibly stuffed full of homemade dumplings by a kindly old chinese lady. the trip was quite a workout for my chinese as well, which i appreciated, though i managed to duck out of many over-my-head conversations by eating and/or playing with my coworker's four year-old cousin. him i could mostly understand.

like in my trip to hangzhou a few months ago, the increased number of cars was quite obvious. our hotel was on the major shopping street in the middle of town, which i vaguely remember from before, but what i don't remember was the cars parked all over the sidewalk. the air quality was significantly better than beijing, as all three days i actually cast a shadow. one guy i met told me that the air has gotten much better recently since the government forced the chemical industry out of town (to somewhere like lanzhou, no doubt), but i don't particularly remember the air being bad last time around. maybe tyler or clark knows.

most time was spent outside of the city walls, but there isn't too much interesting to say about that unless you were terribly interested in xi'an real estate, in which case you can shell out for our reports. needless to say, xi'an looks just like some regular city outside the tourist areas, with a lot of construction and some good stuff going on and some poorly thought out stuff going on. they're building a subway line right now, which i think is not totally necessary but like everywhere in china the critical mass of people exists to make it work.

one more interesting tidbit: xi'an must be hurting from the visa ridiculousness. our quite nice four-star hotel rooms only cost RMB 400 per night (about 58 bucks), and that was after the manager gave us a discount. mind you this is during july, prime international tourist season, and in a centrally located hotel in perhaps the biggest tourist spot in china after beijing and shanghai. the hotel didn't seem particularly crowded either. poor, poor xi'an.