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	Xi'an Hotel (continuation)			GO TO PAGE 3 OF 5
	Remember how we'd arrived in Beijing at the main train station and had departed a few days later from the architecturally magnificent Beijing West station?  So I didn't see any big deal about arriving at Xi'an South instead of Xi'an main train station, and I was just glad that we'd managed to get hard sleeper berths rather than coach seats.  The hard sleeper experience was memorable in its own right, as I've documented elsewhere, but there was one casual remark made along the way that prepared me as much as possible for what was lying ahead.  The medical student who practiced his English with us mentioned that the Xi'an South station was about forty kilometers outside Xi'an.  I knew that forty kilometers was about twenty-five miles.  No problem... The four of us bumped and swerved along the rural road.  Up front, our driver and his buddy were yakking away.  In back, Karen and I were silent.  After a long ten minutes, I saw a road sign that I could read and knew that the driver had made a turn toward Xi'an.  Every time he followed a sign toward Xi'an, I let Karen know.  I don't remember talking about anything else until we saw the lights of the city.  We finally relaxed when the driver dropped off his buddy. When it came to be our turn to be dropped off, he pointed in a direction and said something in Chinese that I didn't understand, of course.  I couldn't see any sign for our hotel, but I paid him the agreed amount and was glad to be out of his van.  We walked a long block.  Lots of people, but no hotel.  So I hailed a cab, started to put our luggage into the trunk, and told the cabbie where we needed to go.  For a moment he looked to me just as confused as I must've looked to him, but then he pointed into a pedestrian mall behind me and said the hotel was down on the right.  I tried to pay him something, but he wouldn't take it.
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