Xi'an - Ancient China

As I'm posting this we are in Shanghai, and now we finally have enough Internet access and time for me to catch you up on some other stops we've made.  From Guilin, we flew to Xi'an on Tuesday, September 16.  We used our first afternoon there to get some laundry done and rest. By that point we really needed a re-charge anyway.  We had an excellent dinner that afternoon at a local dumpling restaurant.  We were served a traditional 12-course dumpling meal and were able to communicate with them that didn't want pork or seafood.  Up until that point it had been hard for us to find restaurants that serve anything but pork.  That was in southern China, though, and Xi'an is further north in the middle of the country.  The further north we get the easier it's been to find food that agrees with our diet.  Anyway, that was our highlight from the first afternoon.

Wednesday morning began with a tour of ancient pagoda in Xi'an.  It was built about 500 years ago and stands 15 stories high.  Mellie and I took the opportunity to climb to the top of it.  Here are some pictures.  Mel has just reached the top and is heading out onto the roof in her picture.

Xi'an prides itself on being the oldest city still in existence in China.  It has thousands of years of history around the city to prove it, too.  There are over 10 million people living there, but taking the tourist route makes it seem very rural and ancient.  It never felt like a very modern city and that's probably why we never felt totally comfortable exploring it ourselves.  From what little experience we had we knew it was very difficult to communicate in English there.

  

This picture is me posing behind the emperor's garb at the official Terra Cotta Warrior replica factory.  This was the second stop on our tour and a chance for us to do some souvenir shopping.

The main attraction of Xi'an is the Terra Cotta Warrior excavation site and museum.  It was the last stop on our tour.  The site is about 45 minutes outside of the city.  It was originally found by a farmer back in 1974.  It has since become a massive excavation site and tourist attraction.  While there are only a few hundred of the life-size soldiers restored in the exhibit, archaeologists suspect there are over 2,000 total.  The statues were buried with the first Qin emperor around 200 BC.  They were there to protect his body in the after-life.  Over time, though, the mausoleums collapsed breaking nearly all the statues, thus the need for restoration.  There are different types of statues that include soldiers, officers, generals, and even horses and chariots.  Remember, all these statues are life-size and no two are the same.  It's quite amazing.

That was about it for Xi'an.  It was a fairly quick stop.  We know there's more to see, but we decided to allocate more time to our Beijing leg which is where we headed next.