I took another hard seat train ride to Xi'an. This ride was only twelve hours so it went by fairly fast and I knew what I was getting myself into this time. As I arrived in Xi'an, there was a man waiting for me with my name on a card waiting to take me to the hostel. That's the first time that's ever happened to me so it felt nice.
I got to my hostel and took a two hours nap after I heard news that Ashley was getting better. After my nap, I went with six girls from around the world who were studying Chinese. They were nice and it was nice for me to be able to just tag along and not worry about getting lost. We went to go see the Terra-cotta Army. If you've never heard of them, the first emperor of China had his people build soldiers thousands of life-size soldiers out of Terra-cotta to protect him in his after life. Surrounding his underground tomb were the soldiers facing all four directions. He had more soldiers facing. The direction of the armies/countries he hadn't conquered. There are more than eight thousand soldiers surrounding his tomb. Each one is slightly different than the other and they were first discovered by accident when people were drilling for oil.
The next day, I ran into the same group of girls by fluke as we were both going to the fortified wall that surrounded the old city. This was a lot of fun as we rented bikes and proceeded to ride around the 12km perimeter of the wall. It was fairly bumpy but a lot of fun.
Xi'an does not offer a ton of touristy things but one more highlight wad the Muslim quarter. As it suggests, there are a lot of Chinese Muslims selling all kinds of products and offering various foods. The best food was a soup with bread crumbs and various vegetables. Absolutely delicious!
Off to Nanjing. I didn't have much time left in China but I did want to see the Nanjing Massacre Museum before going to Shanghai and eventually off to Thailand. The museum was really good and interesting. It was tough reading about all the ways that the Japanese would kill the Chinese men, women, soldiers and even children. There is even an area that has remains of sone of the victims, one with a noticeable hole in the middle of the forehead where he or she would have been shot in the head. As much as I enjoyed learning about the massacre, I found it a little difficult that the Chinese government will vilify anything another country has done to them but will never admit what its own government has done, (Tiannamen Square Incident). There were a few signs that said in the museum that said something along the lines of learn from the past. That seem a little hypocritical. With the A-bomb museum in Hiroshima, I felt more of a sincere search for world peace.