Mr. Yue's Xi'an Experience

"Feerst, we will go to see Terra Cotta warriors, then to hot springs, then local lunch, jade factory, shopping street, then rest for 1 hour at hotel. Then dinner and dancing shew."

Hello, Mr. Yue. I'd call him the soup nazi of tour guides, except with Yue it wouldn't matter what someone did, everyone would get the same soup and have to eat it.



Here he is breaking it down.

Mr. Yue claims to be the first English-speaking tour guide in Xi'an, and he knows the city and the history cold. He also regularly fields phone calls from taxi drivers, serving as an ad hoc translator for their befuddled foreign passengers, and probably has his fingers in a couple other pies as well.



Yue is a lover of meat sandwiches. This sandwich was almost indistinguishable from corned beef and would have benefited from a little spicy brown mustard. I liked it, but Yue loved it.

He's also a married father of two. As a young man, he was ranked as high as 90th in the World Table Tennis Rankings. Not quite as high as his father, but Yue's era was far more competitive. His career came to a sudden halt when he broke his leg during a game, so he started teaching English.



However, after the birth of his second child, his only son, Yue was stripped of his teaching license for violating the one-child policy and began giving tours. His daughter exhibited no interested in ping-pong, so the family ping-pong legacy would have died with Yue, unless he had another child. His son, at 13, spends 362 days a year at a ping-pong training facility middle school, though he will probably return home for high school.



"Ellen, take picture. Yes, I think so. Now Alex. More again. Now both. Yes, I think so. Very good."

Mr Yue is an incredibly conscientious, borderline invasive tourguide. He insisted on wielding our camera at all of the tourist sites. He posed us for pictures, everywhere, and insisted on taking pictures of every minute detail and every last exhibit.

Arguing with Yue is like fighting the tide. He quickly trained us to stand and smile when it was picture time. I think the next blogging project is gonna be ForcedPosingInXian.blogspot.com. At the same time, if someone wanted to spend two days seeing every damn thing to see in Xi'an, Mr. Yue will get that done, and make sure you have the pictures to prove it.