When we last left the trip we were boarding a train to Xi'an. The train was a BIG adventure and lots of fun. Here's a pic of our little compartment. If someone wanted to stand up we had to take turns. It was tight!
I actually slept surprisingly well on the train. We woke up in the morning with about an hour to chill on the train before our arrival and the kids were more than happy to hang out on the upper bunks with their D.S. things. Thank goodness because we wouldn't have all fit sitting down below. I can't imagine sharing one of these units with 3 strangers!
We were picked up by Mr. Bruce and Driver and they took us to our hotel for breakfast. On the way we got our first glimpse of the Ming Dynasty city wall surrounding the old central part of Xi'an. Zombie Apocalypse approved!
Our hotel was really nice but not as charming and historic as the one in Beijing. We were only there for one night. We put all our things in our room, ate breakfast and headed out to see the Terra Cotta Warriors. This is maybe the most significant archaeological find of the last few decades. They only discovered them in the 70's and the farmer that found them is still alive and hangs out signing autographs. Talk about moving up in the world! The warriors are pretty darn cool. They are all different!
Click on this one and you can see their faces and how they are all unique:
That is a cubic butt-load (BL
3) of terra-cotta statues. They're pretty sure that the emperor killed one real person for every statue that's in there. Wrap your mind around THAT one.
That picture above is only one pit of THREE! In pit 2 they haven't even started excavating. They have some cool ares where you can see some of them close-up. This guy is a kneeling archer.
My own little warrior....
After the warriors we went to the Wild Goose Pagoda and climbed to the top. And Sasha lost her hat. There was this nice little temple where services were going on.
The inside of the temple:
After we climbed up the Pagoda we had an ice cream in a beautiful park. There were chickens and roosters all over the place (?) and one mama chicken had a new batch of chicks!
Up close:
The one souvenir that Jeff wanted was a hand-carved family seal. We hung around and then found a guy that would make you a custom seal in 10 minutes. I have to admit, I was a BIG SKEPTIC about this guy's ability to hand carve a seal including the name 'STOLASZ' and a bunch of Chinese, (all of it backwards) at ALL, never mind in 10 minutes, but the dude pulled it off!
A close-up of him making it:
And the final product: How cool is that?!?
After the Pagoda we really wanted to see the city wall. Mr. Bruce and driver brought us there and then we wanted to just walk and hang out so we made a plan to meet them and then took off. The city wall around the old city limits of Xi-an is pretty impressive. Of course now it's just a tiny, walled-off section in the middle of a modern, sprawling city, but back then everything inside the wall was it. And let me tell ya, they were well protected in there. That wall is something else. And the top of it is so wide and so nice it's like having a public park that goes on for miles!
The city wall with some of the old guard buildings.
That night for dinner we had a traditional dumpling banquet - something Xi'an is famous for. I don't have pics of this but there is plenty of video in the move clip at the top of this post. Then we headed home and got ready to hit the sack early because our flight to Tibet was at 7am. I was just getting out the cold-weather clothing when I got a call from Lhasa. It was someone from our travel company and they told us that the government lost our Tibet visa! They had scrambled and re-applied and gotten it again as of 5pm but there was no way to get it to us by our flight in the morning. So they wanted to know if we would be willing to fly to Chengdu the next day and see the Giant Pandas first and they would have someone fly FROM TIBET to meet us to hand us our visa so we could then board a plane to Tibet. Were we willing to do that?!? You betcha! And I was more than just a little bit astounded and grateful for how much trouble everyone in the organization had gone through to fix an unforseen travel snafu. What a bunch of rock-stars! So we packed away the Tibet stuff and got ready to head to Chengdu.
The next day we had some time to kill before our flight so after a nice breakfast we tried out the hotel pool:
Then we headed to the famous Muslim district to sample some street food and hunt down some lunch. It was very cool:
The Muslim district is a tangle of food stands, vendors, restaurants and little shops. It was really fun to explore and we ended up getting a few nice little things there.
Checking out the wares:
We pulled into a little restaurant and ordered some mystery items! It's always interesting to see the difference between what you THINK you ordered and what actually comes out. It was a fine meal though and we got to try a lot of new dishes that we had never tasted before.
Then it was time to head back to the hotel, collect our things and go to the airport for our flight. While we were waiting Sasha and I experimented with some of the cool hair thingys we got in the market place. Quite nice eh?
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