Huayuan Hostel Xi'an

... train mais ca prit plus de temps qu'on pensait alors on a couru en sale pour le train, et on est arrive tres tight. ROADTRIP! Direction: Chengdu, la capitale de la province du general Tao (non y'en a pas ici :(, on dit que le style de cuisine est szechuanais, mais c'est en fait un plat Americano-Canado-Chinois) le Sichuan. Cette fois ci, pour economiser la moitier du prix du billet des couches mous, c'etait un couche dur, une allee dortoir. On s'est fait ...

... t be quarantined, we headed out to grab a taxi to get to the Terra Cotta soliders, which some claim to be the eighth wonder of the world. The hotel hired us a driver for the day who I will call "NAILZ" for the purposes of this entry since this man had the longest thickest most disgusting fingernails I have ever seen on a man or a woman. NAILZ was a crazy driver per usual but managed to get us to the statues in a fairly speedy manner. The price that we paid NAILZ must have been so over ...

... exit then let to smaller nic nac items, clothes, kites and anything else you might imagine. Gene and Constatine had also purchased their Terracotta souveniers on a walking tour in Xian or Beijing. We are now heading out of town towards where the Terracotta Warriors are. On the sides of the expressway there are selling baskets of a fruit each individually wrapped. Kept looking trying to figure out what they were and realized they were Pommegranits. They are grown in this ...

... to reserve train tickets. The train company releases the tickets 10 days in advance and then third-party ticket sellers snap them up and then charge an extra service fee. To leave Beijing for Xi'an we only got soft seat tickets. We antincipated it being miserble but not insufferable. However, once we boarded the train we realized the seats were nothing more than a cushioned bench with little to no personal space. For a 13 hour trip. I promised not ...

... After lunch we visited the Big Wild Goose Pagoda which was built in the Tang Dynasty when a monk from China went to India to learn about Buddhism. He returned and built this Pagoda to house the knowledge of Buddhism ...

... the food and entry fees, rather than the 320yuan tour, where everything is included. The first stop was the Banpo Museum I think. It was basically a couple of thousand years old village that was discovered in 1973 and then unearthed between 1974-1977. In 1978 they built a roof over it and turned it into a museum. The next stop was not on the itinerary. It was a workshop that made replicas of the Terracotta Army. The tour company must get commission for taking people there as just ...

... day. Xi'An is home to the world famous Terracotta Warriors, and each warrior is unique: each one has a different face. Xi'An is a really nice city, bigger than I thought, but I forget that even small cities like Xi'An have 3.25 MILLION people. It used to be China's capital, all the way back to the 11th century BC throughout 11 major Dynasties which makes it a major attraction for international visitors. It is the beginning of the fabled Silk Road and had many of the ...

... site and they have found enormous concentrations of mercury stretching for over 1km which lends credence to this story and has made it impossible to excavate. Cool... Got home exhausted yet again from another full day. We had one more day to spend in Xi'an and we headed out to the Shaanxi Museum (supposedly thaving one of the best collection in China) and the Muslim Quarter of the city. The museum was really interesting but not quite as dramatic ...

... cold beer after beer after beer. Finally, we know how to get through the ordeal ahead. Our grim faces break into huge smiles, being mercifully grateful for the cold, crisp Tsingtao. It doesn't matter that we wouldn't drink this beer in a bar back home if our life depended on it. Right now, it actually does. And right now, it's the best thing on earth. We decide this is the perfect time to get to know more about each other. We share songs and stories, music and raucous laughter ...

... with a French accent to make any native of l'Hexagone wince, but after the clear tones of our Beijing guide references to the "Vanphow Neowific Wiwage" struck a jarring note. It has already taken us some time to work out that "look on your red and sigh" actually meant "look on your right hand side" and that a "bazacle" was not some obscure Chinese artefact, but a bicycle. Strolling the streets of Xi'an at night, we carefully ...