IN XI?AN, the wellspring of the fabled Silk Road of antiquity, Lea Salonga confessed to becoming ?an actual red-blooded tourist.? And when French President Nicolas Sarkozy went on his China state visit November last year, he first flew to Xi?an to view the famous terra-cotta army before meeting with Chinese leaders in Beijing.
My wife Bernie, her sister Cookie, and I are not any kind of celebrity, but in the last week of October we were in Xi?an, enjoying treatment reserved for royalty.
We were there on the invitation of Bernie?s high-school classmate and longtime friend, Sylvia Donato of Vigan. Sylvia?s Austrian husband, Peter Erler, happens to be the general manager of Renmin Square, a complex of four hotels, a grand theater and a convention center.
Having married into a prominent Vigan family, Peter has become as Ilocano as Barack Obama is ?Indonesian.? When faced with the foibles of hotel life, he rolls his eyes and cries, Ay Apo!
But Peter?s favorite word naturally concerns food, being a chef at heart. Among his earliest jobs was serving as food and beverage manager for half a dozen hotels in Manila and Hong Kong between 1968 and 1981.
The mean pizzas and barbecues he now whips up on special occasions at the family resort in Pug-os (a seaside barangay in Cabugao, a town 30 minutes north of Vigan) make for memorable family reunions.
Renmin Square is owned by the Shaanxi provincial government and managed by the French company Accor, which chose Peter to run it. Sofitel Xian?s business is brisk not only because of the official connection but also because this five-star hotel combines elegance and sophistication with warmth, clearly what the GM has worked to achieve.
Week-long food fest
Sofitel has four restaurants and Peter and Sylvia let us sample the delights of every one of them. At Le Chinois, the Chinese restaurant in the compound which serves Cantonese cuisine, we feasted on a 14-course lauriat (for a group of five!) that included Beijing duck, beef tripe in spicy sauce and pork spheres with crab roe in chicken sauce. A big hit with us was the dim sum combination which featured a tasty durian pastry.
The only time we had dinner out was on our second night, when the Erlers gave us tickets to the Tang Dynasty Dinner Show, courtesy of Peter?s friend who manages the restaurant-theater. The show had an overflow crowd of tourists. No wonder. It is a memorable pageantry of recreated Tang Dynasty (618-907 AD) music and dance, capped by a virtuoso performance of an oriole?s repertoire by the show?s executive producer on pai xiao (Pan?s pipes).
Shoppers? paradise
The first evening we started with a walk in the environs of the hotel and then proceeded the next day to do what Pinoys traveling anywhere in Asia love to do ? shop.
Sylvia led us to the Muslim shops beneath the imposing structure of the Bell Tower where we saw the stuff of 168 Divisoria ? and lots more. Our host, a familiar figure in the market, knew enough of the local dialect to drive a hard bargain. After seeing her reduce an overconfident vendor into a cowering penitent, we said she must already have developed a reputation among the vendors of Xi?an.
The Muslim shopping center is a food paradise of sorts. There were a variety of hopia, sweetmeats, and confections made of walnut and other nuts and all sorts of barbecue.
I found what I was looking for in the main alleyway ? the various kinds of champoy (sweet or salty dried fruit) that I wanted to bring home as pasalubong, as well as some pink dried crab apples.
Xi?an?s sights
Our first trip outside the city was, of course, to the site of the terra-cotta warriors. There are three pits where the soldiers, chariots and other artifacts have been excavated. The pit is where the 6,000-strong army (minus the squads sent to various museums or traveling around the world on exhibits) is arrayed.
Fortunately, like other structures in China, the hangar-like building housing the clay figures is huge, for a whole horde of domestic and foreign visitors has descended on the place.
We visited the Hanyangling mausoleum, which is the partially excavated tomb of the Western Han emperor Jing Di (188-141 BC), and marveled at the knee-high figurines of people and animals recovered from around the burial mound. Thousands of the relics have been extracted but lots more are still buried.
The impressive Shaanxi National Museum, meanwhile, houses artifacts of Chinese civilization from prehistoric times through the dynasties. Amazingly, entrance is free. The museum is high-tech, with audio-visual support for the exhibits. Certainly the Shaanxi Museum is up there with the best museums in the First World. What is different there is that you have the feeling the artifacts exhibited appear to be just the tip of an iceberg of still-to-be-discovered treasures.
Taking advantage of the lovely autumn weather, Sylvia took us to visit tourist sites within two hours of the city: the Famen Temple, the hot springs at Huaqing that were the favorite spas of Xi?an?s ancient royal families, Shaanxi?s Baguio at Huashan (Flower Mountain), a wildlife park at the foot of the Qinling Mountains featuring a dozen pandas.
On our last day in the city, we scaled the 12-meter-high city wall, as wide as it is thick, enclosing 14 km of the urban center.
All in all, we had a grand time and had lots of unforgettable experiences, both culinary (choice dumplings sought by both locals and foreigners at a dim sum place near the Muslim market or malagkit black corn on a mountaintop) and otherwise (soaking tired feet in a hot spring pool just like that famed Tang Dynasty concubine Yang Guifei was privileged to do).
But it would take at least another story to tell all this, wouldn?t it?
