Greetings from Xi’an!
This place, the old capital in the day, is pretty cool. Steve and I have had a great time cruising around on bikes and seeing all the touristy sights.
First, a picture from our river trip.
After a 12 hour night train ride from Chongqing, sleeper trains are a great way to travel, we arrived in Xi’an at around 7:30. We checked into our hotel and proceded to rent some bikes for the day. We proceded down the small side streets of Xi’an taking in all the sights and sounds of the city until we arrived at our first destination, the Drum Tower. A pretty interesting place full of, as you can guess, drums. All different sizes of drums, and they had a small 10 minute performance of them being used, which was cool. There were some cool views to be had of the central square and the Bell tower, which we made it too as well.
Next, we proceded through the muslim quarter and checked out the Grand Mosque. Although it didn’t seem really mosque like to me, it was full of some interesting Chinese architecture. From there, through the hordes of tables of people trying to sell you everything under the sun, we made it across the main square to the Bell Tower.
The Bell Tower was cool, offering views across the square to the Drum tower, as well as up and down the four main streets into town. We then got back to our bikes which were in front of the Drum Tower and took off through the streets.
Our next stop was the Shaanxi History Museum. It was full of museumy stuff from way back in the day. From there we headed to a park area that housed the Big Goose Pagoda.
An impressive structure, built to house the Buddhist scriptues brought back from India. I thought is was big and cool.
From the Pagoda we hoped our bikes and raced back through the crowded streets weaving in and out of traffic back to our hotel for the night.
The next day we headed off to see the Terracotta Warriors. The self described “Eighth Wonder of the World”. It was quite interesting too see the amount of work taking to make them and now the amount of work to restore them. An absolutely massive project.
That filled up most of the day, we made it back to town with enough time to run around the city walls that surround a small part of the city, the orignal city.
Taking in the sunset on another exciting day in China. 
Tomorrow it is off to Hua Shan, 2160m peaks, where we will spend the night before heading to Beijing.
Cheers!
October 17th, 2005 at 3:17 am
I now think neck beards are hot. it didn’t take much persuading though.