This is our last day in Xi'an so we leave the hotel this morning with a fairly easy agenda. It's not raining and it's pleasantly cool at the moment. Our cases will meet us at the airport later today when we fly to Beijing. Last night on the way home from dinner and the show we drove past the city wall and one of the city gates. This morning we get the opportunity to explore the wall a little bit and to go inside the gate. It's hard to believe that this wall is still standing in its entirety although there has been some restoration work carried out due to damage caused by rebels from Eastern China who chose to use the bricks in the wall to build their own houses or they simply dug a joke in the wall to live in. The wall us over 13km long but we have no chance of exploring it fully in the 20minutes we are allowed. A few photos and a walk around the gates is the best we can do. In ancient times there were 4 gates in the wall. The Dragon gate, the Turtle gate, the Phoenix gate and the Snake gate. Today there are 18 'gates' in order to move the traffic. The moat still exists and along the moat is a beautiful people's park and this morning we see people doing Tai Chi and exercising in the park. From the wall we next go to the Little Wild a Goose Pagoda. This is the site of a Buddhist Monastery from ancient times. There are trees in the garden that are over 1300 years old. Before entering the Pagoda we get a quick lesson on calligraphy and traditional Chinese painting. The Pagoda is situated in a park with a lake and a few bridges. We have time to feed the golden fish and walk around the gardens. The Pagoda itself is no longer open to the public since an earthquake destroyed the top 2 tiers and caused the structure to develop a huge crack. A subsequent earthquake caused the building to rejoin and it was discovered that the foundations of the pagoda are somehow curved to cope with this sort of movement. The engineering back then was pure genius. Lunch today is a buffet including drinks. This means beer which puts a big smile on lots of faces. The food was quite nice and I believe the beer was very welcome by a number of the group. After lunch we go to the Muslim area commonly known as Food Street. It's quite crowded and we are given reminders about pick pockets and beggars and also not to go down any of the alley ways for fear of getting lost. So many local foods and fruits are sold in this street including some not so wonderful looking meats. It's very alive and busy and fun. No one is trying to hassle you into buying stuff and there are some stalls where you can try bits. Walnuts, dates, persimmons and pomegranate are the most common but they also make a kind of toffee like peanut brittle which is very nice. We all made it back to the bus unscathed and headed off to our next destination to see the little terra cotta warriors. We are given so much information through the course of the day that it's hard to remember everything by the time I get to write this so not so many facts, just what we did and what we saw. The little terra cotta warriors is at this point a lesser known or less visited site. Thís emperor's tomb is surrounded by 800,000 small ceramic statues which were all lined up in underground pits. In this case we go down under the ground to see them and they have put in a glass floor so you can actually walk over the top. These statues are not all soldiers and are naked. When they were buried they were wearing clothing but after 2000 years this has rotted away as has the wood from the carriages and furniture. The amazing thing about this though is that each of these statues have been created as either male or female or eunuch. These were arranged in what would have been their areas of expertise in the emperors kingdom. The archeologists have been able to determine this by some of the artifacts found with the statues. At this stage they have only uncovered such a small part of the site with many years work still ahead. Whether the actual tomb of the emperor will ever be opened remains to be seen. Xi'an has something like 11 emperors tombs within its boundaries and they are constantly monitoring them to protect from tomb robbers. May be one day they will actually open one and find out if all the riches and treasures that are supposedly buried with the emperor really exist. The creepy thing about the tombs is that they are sealed from the inside so some of the workers were entombed alive! Off to the airport now for the last leg of the trip to Beijing, China's capital.