Xi'an
After the train ride we had breakfast in a local youth hostel. A little break from the Chinese food for some cooked breakfast. Quite nice! We are enjoying the local food but it is getting slightly monotonous, so having something a bit English was a welcome change.
We prefer Xi'an to Beijing. It's still a big city (6 million people) but it seems far more spread out, with wider pavements and slightly less traffic. It seems a bit more developed whilst keeping a lot of the traditional Chinese stuff which seemed missing from Beijing.
Qi'min took us for a walk around part of the city and we ended up in the Muslim quarter.
There were loads of stalls selling all sorts of different things - shadow puppets, little red books, tat, paintings, cricket cages etc. Rosie bought a cool antique Mahjong set - we were very tempted but our rucksacs are too full already!
It was a great place to spend a couple of hours exploring.
The city has a Bell Tower & Drum Tower which used to be used for telling the time. We had a look at the Bell tower - great views across the city.
In the evening Qi'min took most of us to a traditional Xi'an hot pot restaurant (Some people chickened out - something about hygeine, I don't know). It was a bit like fondue, with a boiling pot of stock in the middle of the table. Everyone goes and chooses their sticks to dip in - meat, fish, different sorts of veggies. You plunge it in for a few seconds and then dip it into your bowl of seasame/peanut/oily stuff. Quite fun & tasty. They count your sticks at the end to see how much you owe - very cheap at around 7p for 5 sticks.
After that we had a whole bunch of beers in their bar street and then went to a Karaoke club...
Wow - very weird, It was like being in a posh hotel. Lots of suited polite waiters to show you to the ladies and carry your basket of beer. It was spread over several floors, with lots of different sized private rooms. You pay by the hour and just occupy the room, singing bad songs (Kylie & Jason featured at some stage, as did Black Sabbath).
We had great fun, gettign back to our hotel at about 3am!
Tommorrow we are taking a bus to see the Terracotta warriors and then come back into Xi'an to get our next overnight train to Shanghai.
Hope everyone is ok xx
posted by Chris and Jen Coleman @ 10:45 am
10 comments
10 Comments:
Check out the Chicken!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/thechicken/
The chicken lives!!! that's pretty cool, good job he didn't fall off the wall, looking forward to seeing his further escapades,
ps have a new bunny!! Screwball oh yeah & fishes say helloooooooo...
At last! Chicken makes his entrance.
Are you going to try and disguise yourselves like that silly art student at the soldiers?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/5355546.stm
How does one pronounce Qi'min's name?
Hoorah for the chicken!
Hurrah for Chicken! I hope she's taking adequate bird flu precautions??? Have you learnt any good phrases in Chinese???
Eep, what's going to happen with your plans for Thailand? Looks like everything's gone a bit topsy-turvy over there!
I'm pleased to see the chicken got to China safely, fancy it flying all that way under its own steam?
The great wall looks breath taking. I'm green with envy about your going to see the terracotta soldiers. They're apparantly human height which I cannot quite believe!
Forgot to say Mah jong is brilliant! I didn't think you played it though? Never mind, you'll be having these dilemma's your whole trip - so many things so little space to fit them in!
I demand updates and more Chicken!
Qimin is pronounced Chee-Min.
We're a bit worried about Thailand, but it should be OK. Incidentally, we cannot access any BBC web pages or a lot of other stuff because the Chinese government put blocks on them.
We dunno much chinese, but we can say "Hello", "Thank you", er... that's about it really.
The Terracotta wariors are about human height (a bit short, 'cos they're Chinese), and all have individually crafted faces.
More blogging this afternoon or tomorrow.
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