Transportation in Xi’an

Before we arrived, John and I knew we would buy bikes here. We love to ride bikes and with our close proximity to our university they are perfect for getting around. It takes me 15 minutes by bike to my building where I teach and am officed and John about 5 minutes to his building. We actually share an office but I doubt John will come that far anytime soon. Our Mr. Chen who is the source for all wisdom for us—he provides us with bus routes to go shopping, with Chinese characters for everything we need to buy and for our address to get back home again, and gave us directions by bus to get to the bike market almost as soon as we arrived. The bike market is a total street devoted to bike shop after bike shop with bike mechanics out in front of each one. There we found lovely bikes for about $40 each, having bargained them down from double that price. Our next challenge was where to park them. Bikes are stolen with regularity in Xi’an so we realized we’d be risking it by buying bikes, but appealed again to Mr. Chen for guidance. He took us to a “bike garage” just a stone’s throw from our apartment where we paid about $3 each to have them guard our bikes at night from September through December. We check them out whenever we choose, anytime after 6:30 am and return them as late as we want to in order to ride to school, to the green grocer, or to Walmart—wherever we need to go. Across the street from Walmart is a kindly gate guard who I pantomime to asking him to watch our bikes. He willingly does so and refused to accept any kind of tip for his services (you do NOT tip in China). While I’m on campus I park my bike in my office! That is about all I use my office for. It is on the seventh floor but I wheel it in the front door, ride up the elevator with it, and lock it up—all under Mr. Chen’s direction. Pretty nice quarters for my bike really.

Our other modes of transport are by bus and taxis. Our bus cards are scanned as we get on and each ride costs us about 7 cents. Taxis, which we often use to get to Church, cost us less than $3 a trip. XiXu—another university where we meet for Church is about 15 kilometers away from us to the south. We come home on the bus for our 7 cents. The last thing I’d want in Xi’an is a car! We manage very well with these modes of transport. Nice to see how simple life can be.