The Muslim Quarter

After we made it back to the car and met our driver, I was surprised to see the driver’s pushy brother there as well. Apparently, he had driven someone to see the Terracotta Warriors as well.

“You going back to the hotel now?” he asked.

I showed him a copy of a map of Xi’an that we had gotten from the hotel. “No, I want to go here,” I said and pointed to a famous dumpling restaurant in the Old City.

“He takes you there, you pay him,” the pushy brother said.

We were nowhere near four or five o’clock, but I figured we would be awhile and could get back to the hotel on the bus, so I agreed.

The trip back was uneventful, and eventually the driver slowed and started pointing at a large building. I interpreted his gestures to mean the restaurant was in there, and he drove some more until there was a spot where he could drop us off. I paid him, and we started off for the dumpling restaurant.


I can’t remember where I heard about this restaurant, only that they had a dumpling banquet, where you could pay a substantial sum to eat dumplings shaped like walnuts, pigs, penguins, birds, and other assorted items. This somehow appealed to me, but when we reached the restaurant, I quickly learned that no one spoke English and there was no English menu. I probably could have muddled through, but Kinsey was completely nonplussed about having dumplings anyway, and there was a display of all the dumplings in the lobby, so I gave up, and we headed down the street toward the Muslim Quarter.

The Muslim Quarter ended up to be a warren of streets with the equivalent of a permanent New York Street Fair, only with a Muslim and Chinese flavor. Typical vendors hawked nuts, dried fruits, jewelry, cheap toys, and assorted trinkets, as well as foods I never could quite identify.

A few vendors had a nifty iron cooking contraption with six small half-spheres in a row. The vendor would crack small eggs--perhaps quail eggs--one in each tiny bowl. When all six were filled, he would put a skewer across the top. The eggs would cook and puff. He would eventually cover the skewers with a lid with six more half-spheres and turn the contraption over, so that the eggs cooked into six little golden balls on a stick.

Another vendor sold glazed-brown puffy animal shapes on a skewer. I couldn’t quite tell what they were made from--animal bladders? Sugar? We only knew they were edible because someone walked by nibbling one.

Most of the food did not look particularly tasty or edible. However, I came across one vendor who was making Chinese versions of quesadillas--two tortillas with a filling inside. A boy was making the Chinese quesadillas on the street, and then frying them in a giant metal frying pan with lots of hot golden oil. They actually looked quite good--hot and freshly made--so we tried to order one, only to discover that you had to pay inside and they would cook your order outside. The result was something like having dumpling filling inside a quesadilla. Not bad, but tough to eat with chopsticks!

We wandered deeper and deeper into the Muslim Quarter, where the stalls ended and better shops appeared in narrow alleyways. I bought a t-shirt, and then we watched some masterful haggling by several American women who wanted a knock-off handbag.

After a lot of walking, and only a little purchasing, we headed back toward the bus stop and our hotel, tired but happy, and the end of our two days in Xi’an.