After recuperating back in our hotel for a few hours, we worked up the energy to head out for the evening about 9 o’clock. Apparently the “place to go” in the evening in Xi’an is the Moslem quarter, founded by Arab traders over 2000 years ago.

To start with, we just wandered around the small alleys enjoying the sights and soaking up the smells, but very quickly found that the food was just too tempting. First we tried something that were like fried spring rolls, and just ate them walking down the street. This gave us sufficient sustenance to cope with walking around a little more, until we decided that we really needed to eat something more substantial.

We picked one of the many meat-on-stick places, somewhere that looked reasonably clean, and through the usual combination of our poor Chinese, the staff’s broken English, and a bit of pointing, managed to order some meat and a couple of beers. We soon realised that we hadn’t ordered enough meat, so got another round of sticks, and a type of flat bread (paid for separately), which the waitress sliced up for us… and when I say “sliced”, I mean put on a chopping board and hacked apart with a cleaver!

We also got some free entertainment while we were eating: a guy walked into the restaurant with an ehru (sounds like the beginning of a bad Chinese joke), and went round the tables asking if anybody wanted him to play for them. A group of show-off Chinese businessmen types engaged his services, and after going through a few typical Chinese pieces, he launched into Auld Lang Syne, which seems to be very popular over here!

After leaving the “restaurant” and walking around a bit more, we headed to a likely place to find a taxi about 11 o’clock, as more and more traders started setting up their stalls: the night was clearly still young! As well as the usual stalls selling tat, and the people flying huge strings of small kites, we saw something that we’d never seen before: tricycle-mounted telescopes! They were pretty big ones too, something like 15″ reflectors, although I don’t think they’d be able to see much as it was fairly overcast that evening.