Xian

After spending exactly 2 days in Shanghai, I headed off to a city that would be unknown by people other then the fact that some farmer had discovered a large collection of terracotta statues. Xian is a pretty desolate town that appears to survive primarily from the tourist industry that goes to this city as a base to adventure out about 1 hour into the countryside to look at the grand display of Terracotta Soldiers. I ended up going on this adventure with a couple of my friends and we started the first morning out with driving to see the terracotta soldiers. For those of you who are not aware of these statues, when you do a 10 day tour of China, the typical tour includes stops in Beijing (for all the history that it offers), Shanghai (for it just being the modern hub of China), and then they typically hit Xian because of the famous terracotta warriors (you will note that I think in just these couple of sentences I have typed the word "terracotta" more times then I have ever done in my life). So my main reason was to see what the hype was about with the soldiers and I can truly say that it was worth the trip out. We started with the smallest display of soldiers and went to the largest, with the largest being truly amazing. I am not a huge museum person, I would much rather climb a mountain (oh yeah there will be a post about that adventure), but for a display, this was worth it. Just look a the pictures and you will get an idea of what it was all about.

We then went to see the Wild (sometimes called Big) Goose Pagoda and then headed over to the Ming Wall that surrounds Xian. Both were neat, but nothing that I would go out of my way to look at. You could climb up to the top of the wall and walk around on the top. We walked around ¼ of the wall and it took about 40-50 minutes to do this, so that should give you some perspective on how big the wall is around the city.

We ended our day with, in my opinion, the highlight of the trip and it wasn't even a place that we were planning on going. It just so happens that the hotel we were staying at was right next to the Old Muslim Street. So our driver dropped us off at the beginning of the street and we began to walk down it. This is the kind of thing that I like, you had food vendors all up and down (and in the middle of) the street cooking all kinds of different foods. People were hawking all kinds of little things here and there. I can find food streets in Shanghai and I can definitely find people hawking things in Shanghai, but the atmosphere of this street just felt different, mostly because of the heavy Muslim influence.