We went to find a bank this morning because we needed some cash. As an emergency measure we raided our foreign leftovers and found about ?5 worth of yen, Hong Kong dollars and US dollars and took that with us. Most Bank of China ATMs are supposed to work with UK cards, and we checked online to ensure that we had plenty of funds available. Like all the cash machines we've tried recently, this one denied everything and spat out our cards in a way that reminded me of the Australian book exchange lady refusing our non-Lonely Planet guidebook. We don't want your sort round here, it said. We joined the queue in the bank and managed to be befriended by an English man who looked like a woman. He left before us, fortunately. The bank lady was very helpful, tried both cards and was unsuccessful at squeezing cash out of them. So, as a last resort and to get us to Shanghai where there are a lot more ATMs that may take our card, we changed the foreign money into RMB and went for a bit of a walk.

Xi'an's second most popular tourist attraction is a Neolithic Village, but it was closed today, and its opening times tomorrow were questionable. We tried to pick up our train tickets from the big hotel by the station but they said to come back at three. An American lady told us not to stay in the hotel as it wasn't as nice as it looked inside. We had lunch instead (only Lonely Planet could recommend a restaurant on the basis that 'the food's nothing special but it's cheap') and then went for a walk on the city wall.

Xi'an is an ancient city that still has a wonderful fortress-like wall around most of the town. There are a few places to climb up to it, and the one we found was a vertical-ish ladder with very small rungs and a curve over the top of it to make it hard to climb with a backpack. At the top, and virtually opposite the ladder, was a very nice ramp that led to the ground on the other side of the wall. Never mind, eh. We, and two enthusiastically-spitting men, were the only people on the wall which gave a great view of a slightly hazy city. There were some red silk lanterns and some pennants fluttering, and the sun was warm enough to make me take my fleece off, for the first time in China! We strolled, trying to keep out of earshot of the spitting men, and wandered for about an hour. The top of the wall, which was a very wide, flat walkway, was littered with giant green tarpaulins in the shape of stumpy feet. Two of them had a brief history of Xi'an on them; the others were blank. A flock of homing pigeons wheeled overhead.

At the North gate of the city there was a huge gatehouse with a peasant's art exhibition inside and plenty of pressure to buy the pictures and silks. I was tempted by a beautiful scarf that was turquoise or purple or gold depending on which way you held it into the light, but our total cash until Shanghai was only about ?5 so it's probably just as well we didn't buy anything. We ambled back along the wall again, taking the easy way down, and tried to pick up the train tickets. They said come back tomorrow at 5pm, which is only an hour and a half before the train leaves. We're going to have to trust them on that one.

We checked our email briefly and booked a hostel in Shanghai. A website said that sometimes ATMs can be temperamental in China. We also bought a phonecard and, back at the hotel (the loo was blocked again, so someone had to come and fix it again) we phoned Nationwide to ask if it was just a problem with Chinese cash machines or had something recently been changed with our accounts.

Apparently, we are only allowed to take out half of our credit limit as cash, the rest has to be done as proper purchases, which is news to us. The nice man said this policy had been in force 'for some time' which could mean a week, I suppose. Any transfer of funds, the quickest way to allow us to access cash, will take five working days, which is great news for us with our ?5. The hostel we've booked in Shanghai won't accept credit cards.

We ran through our options and the only thing we can do (appart from change the ?0 we have in English money, the last resort cos I really wanted to have a tiny bit of money to spend before Christmas!) is to ask the hotel to return the cash we paid for the room in return for a credit card transaction. So that's tomorrow's task. Otherwise we'll have to convince the Shanghai hostel to let us pay at the end of our stay when the five working days are up, which will hopefully allow us to get cash. What annoys me is that Nationwide implemented this policy without notifying us or even giving us some warning. We wrote to them before we left to explain that we wouldn't be able to check our paper statements or post until Christmas so could they just email us if there was something important. Maybe it's their policy or something to do with security that meant they're not supposed to email. Anyway, we went out again to set a money transfer in progress and we both wrote sob stories to the Nationwide in the hope that they can give us just a bit of leeway with our accounts. Fingers crossed!

We had such a hard time finding a restaurant last night but on the way home we passed several. We thought we'd try a big sparkly one tonight in the hope that they'd accept our credit card as payment! The place was huge, with a massive wooden spiral staircase going up the middle of the restaurant to the three floors above. We were shown to a table with a gas ring in a well in the middle of it, and the man pouring tea smashed the glass and we had to move to another table. Then the menu was presented, entirely in Chinese but with lovely pictures. We had guessed that it was some sort of hotpot restaurant, so we picked the tastiest picture and then there was conferring among the waiting staff. Mikey said that behind me was a gang of about seven of them, all come to see what the weird foreigners wanted. There was a general consensus and the lady with the best English stepped forward and asked us to choose something else. We thought the dish looked pretty big, but she suggested some beef, and mushrooms and pork so we just nodded. A few minutes later the hotpot itself arrived. It was a steel basin with an S-shaped divide down the centre, separating a red liquid with chillis in it from a white liquid with onions. There were six bowls of various coloured pastes too. We tried to look like we knew what we were doing but I don't think we succeeded. With the inevitable audience, a lady mixed spoonsful of pastes into a bowl of oil and then, for the next hour, cooked wafer-thin pieces of beef and pork in the various bubblig broths and laid them in the bowls. Every time one of us tried to be sneaky and cook something for ourselves, a waitress would come and help out.

It really was delicious. The chilli side of the bowl was very hot and had large pieces of chilli and small round ones too. There was a plethora of berries and sticks and strange leaves in it, a combination of mulled wine and my dad's cooking. I accidently bit into a berry and lost all sensation on my tongue for about half an hour. It actually felt like a dental anaesthetic gone wrong and I kept dribbing, but it all seemed to be part of the fun. The white soup was a chicken-ish stock that acted as a soup too and we were served ladle after ladle of it. Every time we thought we'd finished, the lady swirled the spoon into one of the broths and fished out more meat or mushrooms. We finally had to call it a day. The whole thing, which took more than an hour to eat, cost less than a fiver, and we left a tip to thank them all for their patience - about twelve people had been involved in helping us out in some way. As we left the restaurant, one of the waitresses ran out afterwards with the tip money and pressed it into my hand. I tried to protest but she shook her head, bowed a bit and disappeared. Very strange but thoroughly entertaining though.