Xi'an (Day 1)

May 28th

Today we had to say goodbye to Gary and head to Xi’an. Gary was a great tour guide. Not only was he really knowledge about Beijing and was so helpful with everything else. It will be hard for anyone to top him on this trip. Most of the day was just travel. We spent most of the day on buses, airports, and airplanes. It was all pretty uneventful. 

Beijing traffic

can you tell what kind of drinks we got?

We made it to Xi’an and our new tour guide, Lucy was there to meet us. She was nice enough and she did a good job getting all of us rounded up and on the bus to our hotel. We made it to our hotel around 4:45pm. Jed, Tim and I had pre-purchased the dumpling dinner tonight so we quickly dropped off our stuff in our new rooms and headed down to meet Lucy to take us to dinner. 

Dinner was great. They just brought us 3 dumplings of a million different flavors. The weirdest one for me was lotus root and I am not sure if I loved or hated the potato & orange dumpling. They had all kinds and it was so fun to try them. We even had hot pot (huǒ guō) and thought of Jing. The meal was a huge success in our books.

After dinner we made our way to the Bell Tower & DrumTower. Xi’an has this huge city wall. And back in the day, every morning they would ring the bell from the tower and that would signify morning and they would open the gates and in the evening, they would beat the drum from the tower and that would signify night and they would close the gates. 

The architecture was impressive and the views were great from both of the towers. Unfortunately it started to rain. We said was just watched the city and the traffic for a while from the two different towers. They have packed a lot of things in the city walls of Xi’an. Everything is walkable and there is shopping EVERYWHERE!

We decided to call it a night pretty early today. We have a big deal tomorrow. We are off to see the Terra Cotta Warriors!