Ok, an early rise as usual today! First on the planning is the old city wall. This wall currently only consists of a small part of the ancient city wall (which enclosed an area 7 times bigger) and it is possible to make a scenic bike ride over its' entire length of 14 km.

This seemed like a great idea to us (Christopher and me). However, during the ride we found out that the view on the city wasn't that interesting as we'd hoped for as the only interesting sight was a small Buddhist temple. Nevertheless after 1,5 hours of biking we had another activity to chip off on our "things to do in Xi'an when you're there"-list.

As it was time for lunch we combined useful with touristic and set out for an old and well known Muslim restaurant. According to the "Lonely Planet", the restaurant specialized in a type of soup with bread and mutton, which supposedly was very good. The excellent navigation skills of Christopher first lead us to another restaurant (map upside down). Finally, after having had the luck that only one person ate in that place, I was the lucky person to at last try the special soup.

Under close attention of all staff members (14 persons) as well as all customers it became clear how the soup should be eaten. Part of the fun was crumbling the two pieces of bread (similar to pita bread) in very small pieces. Afterwards the broth was added and the meal could be enjoyed. The entire process took me about 1,5 hours and lots of fun: now that's value for money!

To compensate for this serious loss of time we quickly took a cab to the "Big Goose Pagoda" and decided to drop the "Small Goose Pagoda" from our schedule. After all, bigger = better, and the name made it sound like more of the same thing.

This pagoda was however not just a pagoda, but also an entire park around it. Since we paid for everything we couldn't leave without having seen everything... (probably due to my Dutch nature).

Short on time we left the park, which was very nice and very worth the visit, to grab a taxi to our hotel. Unfortunately it took us more than 40 minutes to convince a taxi driver by our nice smiles to take us with him. A little too late, and with everybody worried at the hotel we were just in time to grab our bags and head to the train station.

On route a quick dinner + performance stop at the Huiling school was planned, which is a school for special children. Intrepid-travels is a sponsor of this school association, and I personally think that it is a very good cause. Travel jams made us arrive a bit late (while we already were a bit later than planned) so it was a very efficient dinner. Luckily we still got the chance to show off our dancing skills together with some of the students and their teachers on the Chickendance (Vogeltjesdans ). After nearly causing a public lynching by making our bus-driver wait while we bought some water, it was full speed ahead to the train station and off to Suzhou!

N.B. I forgot to mention that our tour guide was very impressed by the big amount of stuff that we saw in our short visit to Xi'an as well as the fact that we were the first tourists in her group that actually tried the special soup dinner...