Xian

Early the next morning we embarked on another day and night of travelling on the trains to reach our destination at Xian the following morning. The usually mundane task of travelling was broken up by myself, Katie and Sjofn playing Mahjong in the open sleeper compartments of the train. We were happily playing by ourselves when at one of the stoops our neighbouring carriage was filled by some locals around our age who not only found our appearance interesting but the fact that we were playing Mahjong seemed to bring great hilarity in the ranks. We were suddenly the centre of attention as two of the locals stood in our cabin looking over our shoulders as we played. Every move was commented on and when one of us eventually won this brought a great cheer from our new found friends. We assumed that as we were shuffling the tiles for a new game they novelty would wear off but as soon as we set up for the next game they were back with the same vested interest as before. We finished this game and acted as if we were tired with lots of theatrical yawning and put the set away and luckily the interest in us died!

Arriving in Xi'an at the beginning of the day the first thing that we realised was we were back in a metropolis again. Xi'an was the former Imperial capital of China and looking around as we lugged our packs to the hotel there was certainly a lot to keep us amused during our stay. Xi'an had served as the seat of 12 imperial dynasties over the last 2000 years and is the starting point of the Great Silk Road that runs through Central Asia and on to Europe. It was the largest city in the world during the Tang Dynasty (618-907AD) but was abandoned after the fall of Tang and began a long period of decline that lasted until the Ming dynasty times when the surrounding city walls were rebuilt to the glory that we saw in them today.

After a freshen up we(I say we in the royal sense as Katie was resting the hotel after not much sleep on the train) had our obligatory orientation walk with Lillian. We walked in a large circuit around the major attraction with Lilian pointing out the Bell Tower, the Muslim quarter (for excellent barbequed food) the Drum Tower and the endless amounts of shops and malls (if that's what you really wanted to do). Once I had met up with Katie again at the hotel and we went out and about browsing around the markets having a bit to eat from the street sellers and scoping out potential places for dinner in the Muslim quarter later. Also whilst we were wandering we decided to take a look around and up the Drum tower. This multi tiered building built during the Ming dynasty around 1380 is a slightly smaller version f the Bell tower which is directly opposite it across the square. We had timed it just right as by the time we had finished looking around the 3 levels at the surrounding cityscape we were just in time to see a 20min (free) performance from the drum players. They were playing various different sorts of temple drums from small handheld drums made from what looked to be large gourds to huge floor standing temple drums which were either hit with cloth covered beaters or pummelled by spinning, what looked to be, cloth covered poi. Although the players were young they certainly knew how to hit these drums and the speed and rhythm never faltered throughout their whole performance. By the time we had finished watching these and had another mooch around the markets we decided to head back to the hotel to meet up with Helen and Sjofn before heading back to the Muslim quarter for some barbeque experience.

When walking through the area early I was pretty busy but nothing had prepared us for the amount of people there in the evening. The street was packed from wall to wall either side with locals and tourists all looking for something delicious to eat. Amount of stalls seemed to have doubled too with people just setting up their cookers and trays of red hot coal in the middle of the street. Even though we were finding it difficult to walk without treading on the people in front of us or barging people into other people the locals still insisted on riding their bikes or rickshaws through the middle of the crowds by just ringing their bells of=r beeping their horns when people dint move in time. Just as we thought that we were not going to be able to eat in all this commotion we saw a BBQ restaurant at the side of the road and before we knew what was happening we were guided (dragged) inside with all the locals and placed at a not so clean table left wondering how we are going to order anything as all we could say in Mandarin was Hello, Goodbye and I don't Understand! One of the staff took us out to where everything was being cooked and we pointed at what we wanted and after some initial confusion we had ordered 20 lamb, 5 chicken and 10 beef skewers, some flat bread and some beers and juices. We sat back and let them bring us the freshly cooked meats and it was delicious. I was happy because you could add extra hot chilli sauce to whatever you wanted then cool yourself off with an ice cold beer. We left that place very contented and stocked full of energy for the next days trip to see the Terracotta Army.