Xi’an has been the first city that really feels like “China”. The China that I think of, the hundreds of identical residential towers, the electric scooters silently whizzing about, the endless population and scale visible all in one place.

Bike next to the city gate

I’m quite grateful for our decision to go straight to Xian from Guangyuan. This has given more time to get to know this city, and to rest.

Walking street near my hotel

The first order of business was to drop my bike off at the garage, which was introduced to me by a Chinese salesperson of motorcycle parts in Dubai. I’d been looking forward to this as this was where I’d have the chance to get a bunch of new parts installed. I had also planned to get a fresh set of tyres here, but because they couldn’t find the ones I wanted (TKC70 rocks), i will stop in Ducati Urumuqi instead.

Mechanics hard at work

At the shop, which was based in a car park underground, i went on a bit of a wild shopping spree. I bought:

• set of large 5 bulb spotlights
• heated grips
• souped up mobile phone mount with magnetic dampening for vibrations and wireless charger
• new GPS mount
• Crash bar bags (which are inflatable to add extra cushioning in case of drop)

I also fixed some things i thought were suboptimal:

• moved bidirectional charger to handlebars from the dash
• removed the long metal selfie stick thing from the front of my bike (i have been afraid of accidentally impaling myself/someone else in case of accident)

This was a lot, but also quite inexpensive for the quality of products (in total 5800 yuan). I was particularly impressed with the gps mount. There were no off the shelf products which could mate the gps charger i had to the bar mount they installed. They apologised and were going to leave it until I gave them some gentle encouragement that I RELLY wanted this problem solved. They gave their friend a ring and before we knew it, they were getting a custom part ready for me.

“Hi can you please custom fab some parts for me”

I spent most of the day at the garage, doing laundry, and ended up meeting Kiat for dinner. This would likely be farewell as he spent the day getting his bike ready for shipment back to Thailand, and would spend the next few days on guided tours.

Chicken Hot Pot with Kiat

Street-side haircuts at the ancient city!

Friday the 4th was my chance to get other admin done, and to do some touristy things.

• collected warranty gps which was shipped from Shenzhen
• shipped broken gps to Shenzhen (only 15 yuan!)
• bought new sd card And then went to see the terracotta warriors. It is quite surreal to see such detailed and lifelike figures from >2000 years ago. My initial reaction was that it was a HUGE use of resources, and I’m not sure that this was the best use of people’s excess capacity.

My secondary reaction was that this probably would be the most celebrated thing done by the emperor at the time. Thousands of years later, he commands an audience in the thousands each day, with each learning about the kingdom he built and his achievements. While his political achievements would have left their mark on history, this would probably be celebrated to a much lesser extent / be much less visible. The mausoleum (which he constructed through his reign) gives good insight into the society he led, its wealth, and their way of life and of war for those thousands of years later.

Terracotta warriors

Particularly handsome warrior

The way back I was driven by a Muslim taxi driver. He looked very Chinese and was curious about Dubai. He lamented the pressures of life in Xi’an and mentioned that he couldn’t do the daily prayers or sometimes even do the Friday prayers due to work. We had an interesting conversation on the impacts of COVID on society, on Muslim demographics in China (apparently 30-50 million in this region, which is wild because that’s likely more Muslims than there are in the Gulf), and on how the people are feeling with respect to the economy. The sense i got from him was that things were tough,

• housing prices have been declining, which make savers feel poorer, and reduce housing related economic activity and jobs (eg renovations, etc)
• covid killed many businesses and savings. He used to own 8 gyms and run a few other businesses. Covid meant 3 years of rent and employee salaries with no revenue, before they ran out of money. Apparently 45% of gyms shut down due to COVID
• young people are demoralised and increasingly not having kids. They are less traditional and see less need to pass on their lineage. Instead they want to live a good life, go travel, etc. The burden of parenthood and of costs associated with children was too high.
• he thought it would be be really good to do business in Australia or in Dubai where there is far less competition and population I feel a similar sense, in that I feel like a large part of working age society is “burned out”. I would guess that all those years of high pressure high stakes education has taken their toll on large parts of the youth, and economic hardship has been tough on parents and working age adults. Opportunity creation probably hasn’t been very evenly distributed, with it favouring the educated (and probably those whose talents are in tech or STEM). Wages seem stagnant for other sectors of the economy. This seems to mirror what I heard from a recent podcast which raised the point that the political focus on high tech sectors probably hasn’t created equal opportunities (as employment in high tech sectors are not a very large part of aggregate employment), and this has come at the expense of greater focus on opportunity creation and deregulation on more broadly reaching sectors.

Back to Xian, I spent the remainder of the afternoon at the motorcycle shop. The gps mount wasn’t perfect, and the bidirectional charger was playing up, so I hung around the garage while solutions were found to these problems.

New kit!

New kit pt 2!

Dinner was a local specialty; a wheat and noodle dish where you first tear the bread into pieces, which are then cooked into the noodles.

I’ve taken the opportunity to reorganise my bags so that a lot more weight is shifted to the tank bags, and up front (vs on the rear bags), so that hopefully it is smoother when riding on rough roads. I’m very excited to ride tomorrow, with all the new comforts I’ve added!

Some stats:

• No fuel added
• 6 unique interactions
• 30g coffee consumed
• 36 KMs traveled