Friday, July 13, 2018
We woke up on the sleeper train shortly before pulling into Xi’an. The other passengers had settled down nicely overnight, and it hadn’t been as noisy as I’d feared. But by morning, the bathroom was in pretty bad shape, the smoke haze had reappeared, and we were ready to get off that train.
Our new Mr. Orange driver was waiting for us as we came out of the station. We loaded up our luggage, and set off for the Terracotta Warriors, about an hour’s drive away. We got there just after 9 am and agreed to meet our driver again in a couple of hours. Then we purchased our entry tickets, declined numerous offers for guiding services, and followed the throngs of people already heading to the pits.
We decided to start with Pit 1, which is by far the most spectacular. We briefly debated going in reverse order and leaving Pit 1 for last, but thought that the crowds were only going to get worse, and that we should see the best of the best with the least amount of jockeying for position possible.
The warriors were pretty cool to see in person, but there were no surprises. If you’ve seen photos from this site then you pretty much know what to expect.
We went on to the next two pits – I’m not sure if we went in numerical order or not – which had way fewer full soldiers, and showed more of the excavation and restoration process.
The most interesting part to me was to see an area with workers in the pits with the warriors, painstakingly trying to piece them together and using little toothbrushes to clean off the shards.
It was much too dark in these areas to take any decent pictures, at least with my camera equipment.
Coming out of the last pit, we did debate going back to Pit 1 again. But with the crowds of people continuing to pour in, we decided we had accomplished what we wanted to do, and would be satisfied to leave. We had some time to kill before meeting our driver, so we had some ice cream and browsed in a few shops. There is a huge complex of shops and restaurants set up at the exit from the site.
With that, we headed back into Xi’an to our hotel, the Grand Park. Our rooms were ready for checkin when we arrived a little past noon. We got a great deal on two connecting rooms, with breakfast included. (Some places we stayed in China had family suites available and we rented those when we could, but some places maxed out at 3 people per room, likely a holdover from the old One Child Policy days. We rented two adjoining rooms when we couldn’t fit 4 people into a single room.) The hotel is well appointed, and coming off a night in a sleeper train – it felt like heaven. It’s got great views of the old city wall, and was within walking distance of the other places we wanted to see.
After we freshened up a bit, we headed out for lunch. Knowing we’d be eating dinner at the Muslim Street market, we catered to our picky eater by going to McDonald’s for lunch. This was actually quite fun to see how different the menu items are from what’s at home. I love a Filet o’ Fish, and the ones in China are totally different (and not very good). The sweet taro pie, on the other hand, was a pleasant surprise.
I used the McDonald’s bathroom after our meal and it was go time – they only had squat toilets, I sucked it up and used one, and lived to tell the tale!
After lunch, we went up on the city wall and rented bikes.
We then took a couple of hours to do a complete loop around the wall, which is 8 miles/14 km. We stopped at nearly every cafe on top to buy bottled water – the sun was coming out and it was pretty hot, maybe around 90F.
It was very uncrowded on top of the wall with the exception of the area right around the south gate where the tour buses park and people climb up for a look-see. Once you get away from the south gate, the crowds really thin out.
Finally we made it the whole way around. Hot and tired, we headed back to our hotel for a shower and a break. Around 7 pm, we headed out again. This time, our destination was Muslim Street. We planned to eat dinner there (though after our greasy fast food lunch, none of us were all that hungry), and in particular we were hoping to find a cotton candy vendor whose creations we had seen online before our trip.
Muslim Street as it turns out is not just one street, but a whole complex of side streets as well.
Coming out of there, we wove up and down numerous side alleys in search of the elusive cotton candy. We saw lots of flatbreads for sale…
And we saw these everywhere. Oh, let’s get one!, we said; a pineapple spear would be delicious right now. Ha ha. These are actually glutinous rice cake with date sauce. And they aren’t very good, IMHO. We didn’t finish it.
We eventually decided to throw in the towel on searching any further for the cotton candy, and were going to simply head back to our hotel via the main road, when we finally found it!
Mallory chose a design and they spun her a lovely creation, which she shared with the rest of us. Good thing, too; it was huge.
Happy that we’d accomplished our goal, and all growing very tired, we started to head back to our hotel. Chad and Liam had to make one last purchase when we passed “the tentacle stall”. No idea what sort of tentacles these were, but they really liked them.
On the way back to our hotel, we encountered several bits of entertainment; the city really comes alive at night. First, there was a show featuring beautiful traditional costumes and music and lights happening between the the outer and inner city walls. We also saw a few groups of (mostly) ladies line dancing on the sidewalk closer to our hotel.
And finally, the Drum Tower and Bell Tower and city wall were all lit up beautifully too.
We could have chosen to stay out much later to enjoy these, but the desire to sleep won out, and we headed back to our room.
Cook Family Travels 