Xylophone Xi'an

X'ian, the home of the famed terracotta warriors; spent only two nights here in a fairly scummy basement dorm room (our clothes still smelt of the dankness weeks afterwards and there was a policy of not changing the sheets)....on the first night we were woken up by banging on the door at 1:30 in the morning; a slightly intoxicated chinese gentleman stumbeled into bed and started to snore like a anthetised ox....this was okay for the first 40 seconds or so, but after a few hours of fitfull sleep clare and I started trying to rouse this noise making machine by shining our torches on him and dangling our sarongs in his face. We swapped rooms for the next night, then almost a month later in Lhasa we were greeted by a very enthutiastic Ni Hao!!!!, it was the snoring man again..but luckily he wasn't in our dorm. Yep, Xi'an's city wall is still intact (or should I say reconstructed) and runs in a 20km square around the center of town. A great little muslim quarter with really nice beef jaozter (steamed dumplings)...,easy to use buses, a bustling backstreet market south of the city walls, a table-tennis war of attrition between clare and mark (with clare as the convincing victor) quite a bit of poverty and of course the warriors. Really good set up around the pits where the warrioirs are (three pits in total with one really big one)...amazingly well preserved this clay army was built to guard some emperors tomb. Well worth the visit and the first really touristy thing we did in China (although not the last). Real trouble getting a train ticket onwards to Beijing, had to settle for a hard seat...more on this in the Beijing section.

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