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Hello again from Xi'an, three days later and I'm doing another blog post...that's definitely progress!We are just in the hostel killing a little time before we get a taxi to the station to get Dico's for dinner (chinese version of McDonald's/KFC, although they have hundreds of both of those too, pretty much a KFC on every corner in Xi'an!) and board our soft sleeper for the 16 hour journey to Shanghai...
So anyway, we got up bright and early on Thursday and headed to the Terracotta Warriors... oh no, hang on, we didn't as we both foolishly decided not to set an alarm as we hadn't had a lie-in in yonks, then 12 hours later we woke up at 11.30am, whoops!!By the time we got ourselves sorted and had breakfast, we didn't leave the hostel until about 1, and taking the advice of one of the very helpful staff we got a bus to the station for the grand sum of 1RMB (about 10p) then hopped on the 306 bus to the Terracotta Warriors. We met a Canadian guy Trevor on the bus so got chatting to him for a while, another English teacher living in China for 2 years, we seem to meet loads of them!!We got to the Warriors about an hour later around 2ish, and as we were worried about time we decided to get the 'tourist shuttle' up the hill to the main attraction (according to my lonely planet it took 15minutes to walk)- which is basically a glorified golf buggy which all the chinese tourists were getting really overexcited about and pushing ahead to get on them!Anyway, after about a 15 second ride (15 mins my arse!), we got to the ticket office and headed in. The site is made up of three pits, pit one is the biggest and most impressive, with about 6,000 warriors in it, pit 2 the second biggest and pit 3 the smallest, but it's thought to be the army headquarters as it were as they found loads of high ranking warriors in there. All the pits are enclosed under big exhibition buildings, so it wasn't really the rustic experience we both thought it would be (weirdly in my head I kind of imagined an archeological dig site kind of in the vein of the 1930s style agatha christie type egyptian affair!!), and very touristy, but really amazing to see it, and look at all the detail that went into making them. It's so crazy that they were just hidden underground for hundreds of thousands of years as Qin Shi Huang, the emperor who had them made, was the first emperor and lived some time BC. There was also a small exhibition in pit 2 of a select few of the restored higher ranking warriors in glass cases so we got to examine them up close, and in the exhibition hall building there were also lots of artifacts from the emperor's tomb itself (apparently the whole site spans about 56km, and the warriors are just part of it as it was built as a kind of underground model of a real city, with an area for acrobats, officials, rare animals, stables etc), while apparently took about 38 years to build and was started when Qin Shi became emperor at the age of 13. Pretty interesting stuff.
When we got back to Xi'an on Thursday evening, we headed to a restaurant that was recommended in the lonely planet called First Noodle Under the Sun, which wasn't touristy at all thankfully, but filled with chinese people tucking in to noodles, and in particular the restaurant's speciality, a 3.8m (I think the number is auspicious in some way, something to do with dates!) long whole noodle served hot with two side soups for dipping, one of them being shark fin. The menu was a picture one and we were a bit silly and didn't really think about the size of it- it just looked like a snack- so when they brought out these massive noodle-filled bowls we kind of regretted ordering a chicken dish between us on the side!!The noodle was great though, as was the chicken curry dish (though there were a few questionable looking bones in some of the chicken, they really do use the whole bird here!), and Jade was a trooper and ate her whole one, but I was slightly put off by a fly going into mine, so faded before I got to the end!!We caught a bus back to the hostel (we had planned to try and see the fountain and light show at Big Goose Pagoda but I was feeling a wee bit unwell), and headed to bed in time to meet a roommate, a girl from Newcastle called Zara who was on a 3week holiday from work travelling by herself.
Friday was an incredibly laid back day for us, we just chilled out in the morning and had a leisurely breakfast (my second lot of pancakes and maple syrup, this hostel has great food!!) then headed near the Drum Tower to the Muslim quarter again in search of a great sounding chicken kebab place. After much stress and searching the tiny, sign-less streets up and down, we eventually found the little hole in the wall place and tucked into yummy chicken pittas with large sprites all for the purse friendly price of 6 RMB (60p) each!It's amazing that you can get food like that in China, I really love the fact that chinese food is so varied and quite often different from province to province, it's definitely not just like the food we get from the takeaway (though I think that is mainly cantonese style and we are planning on heading to a place after Hong Kong that does cantonese food so I'm really excited for that!), and there's a lot more bread that I expected which is great because I really love my carbs! After lunch we headed to the Post Office near the Bell Tower as Jade has some packages to post and we both had postcards. There was an international mail desk with an english speaking girl which was great, though I think she got a bit sick of my incessant questioning and when I kept bringing her more postcards to stamp!It seemed incredibly efficient (more so than the PO back home), so I'm hoping our stuff is currently winging it's way back home.
Yesterday night the hostel put on their weekly dumpling party which was a bit cheesy but really fun as we got to roll out dumpling dough and fill and seal our own dumplings, with both meat (I'm guessing pork but I'm not sure!) and veggie (egg and green veg) fillings. The process got a little boring after a while, but it was a good activity to get people talking, though we did embarassingly have to introduce ourselves using the super enthusiastic guy Tom's microphone, and he kept telling us 'DO NOT let the filling touch the outside of the dough' which we couldn't stop giggling over. We did meet a nice girl Izzy and her mum Maria though- She's from London, studying at Sheffield Uni but on her year away to Nanjing as she's studying Spanish and Chinese for her degree, so a very interesting girl!She was telling us a bit about learning to speak chinese and write it, it sounds sooo complicated and I'm totally in awe of anyone who can speak and write it, it's quite an achievement!!I'd definitely consider taking some mandarin classes when I get home too, I think it'd be really cool to at least speak a little bit more than our woeful 'hello' and thank-you' at the minute! We also chatted to Izzy's mum who I think was a bit of a hippie and kept telling us that we as young people don't fight/campaign/protest about things enough these days, and we should change the world. Ring any bells dad?!Anyway, the conversation got to be pretty serious but it was fun to chat about something else apart from just travelling. Though we also touched on my complete lack of knowledge of what I want to do with my life which always freaks me out!!
Today, after breafasting on massive doorstop wedges of french toast, and trying to sort hostels for when we are in Hangzhou (afte rShanghai) which took over an hour as the internet here is painfully slow, we headed to the bus (again, only 1RMB) to go to Big Goose Pagoda, a pretty impressive Buddhist building just outside the city walls. After paying the pretty exorbitant 50RMB entry fee (which we thought included climbing the Pagoda tower) and having a poke about the various buddhas and artefacts on show, we headed to the entrance of the tower only to get turned away as we had to buy another ticket to climb up it for 30RMB!!Annoyed at the crazy prices, we just decided to give it a miss, but there is a massive fountain just outside the Pagoda complex (apparently the biggest in Asia!) and we managed to catch the 2pm fountain show, complete with music and lots of people wanting their pictures taken with us!We did get a little bit soaked when we were in the middle of the fountains, but it was definitely worth it and lots of fun!!We headed over to the Muslim Quarter to pick up some pastry goodies for our breakfast on the train tomorrow, and got those delicious chicken kebabs for lunch again!!
Anyway,better go here as we need to be heading to the station, not a very exciting post but more soon.Hopefully if I get to a decent computer soon I can put some more photos up too.
Lots of love from Xi'an xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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