Xi'an and the Terracotta Soldiers

Since Muir already did a great job typing up a summary of our trip to Xi'an, I'll add additional details and a few photos.

Many thanks to my mother who reminded me to double-check the terminal from which our outbound flight departed.  They are not close together and could easily cause a hapless traveler to miss his/her flight.  But we knew where we were going and arrived two hours before departure.  As Muir mentioned, airport security was a breeze relative to the US.  We didn't even have to take our shoes off!

A bridge in the lobby. Fancy!

 We stayed at the Kempinski hotel.  It's listed as a five star hotel in China, and it was quite nice.  The service was fantastic and even the hallways were clean.  Most of the staff spoke at least some English.  It had three in-house restaurants:  a buffet, a Chinese restaurant featuring the local cuisine, and a German brew pub.

Um, do the pony?

Local specialty--mutton and bread soup

We ate dinner the first night at a famous restaurant in Xi'an, 同盛祥 (Tong sheng xiang).  The Muslim dish we wanted to try was a mutton soup with unleavened bread that kind of turns into dumplings in the broth.  There are also some meng bean noodles in the soup and you can add pickled garlic and cilantro to your liking.  It reminded me a lot of Vietnamese pho, except that the mutton was already cooked.  It was terrific!

Drum Tower

Bell Tower

We were really close to both Xi'an's drum tower and bell tower, so we snapped some quick photos of them.  You can't really tell from the photos, but the weather was drizzly the entire time we were in Xi'an.  Getting back to the hotel was a nightmare.

Ok, here come the pictures from the Terracotta soldiers.  Besides what Muir already described, we decided that it was not worth it to get the audio guides sold at these kind of big tourist attractions.   They're expensive and of rather poor quality and hard to hear with all the other visitors around, and the point is really to be able to see the site for yourself.  If you want to learn about the site, you can find better narratives and detailed photos and maps online or in documentaries.

One small part of the shopping area around the Terracotta
Soldiers

A partially excavated pit showing the rafters
of some of the buried chambers.

Restored terracotta horse and cavalryman

The famous kneeling archer.  His bow
had long since rotted away.

Another pit with more horses and cavalrymen

The last and probably most famous pit
containing row after row of excavated
soldiers.

Eating lunch of noodles, the province's specialty.

This dish is biang biang noodles.  It's sort of "a little bit of everything" noodles.  It has onion, celery, potato, choice of meat, green pepper, and a tomato sauce.  "Biang" is written with a new character that has about 57 strokes and hasn't yet been encoded so that one could type it with a keyboard.

That evening we just stayed in the hotel and read for the rest of the afternoon.  We had dinner at the German brew pub (not bad), and went swimming in the swimming pool.  Oh, I almost forgot!  The bed was my favorite part of the hotel.  It actually had a pillow-top mattress like in the US, and not just a stiff box spring.  I slept like a baby both nights.  It was heaven.

Wednesday morning we took a taxi back to the airport to fly home and encountered the thickest fog I've ever seen in my life.  Everyone started driving slow and flicked on their hazard lights.  I kid you not, we couldn't even see the huge toll plaza until we met up with the concrete barriers that separated cars into the different lanes twelve feet before the booth.  Good thing the driver knew it was somewhere around there.  Oh, and we also arrived at the airport so early that we couldn't use the e-ticket kiosk to check-in.  We had to wait until 90 minutes before our flight's departure.

On Wednesday night, we met up with Mark Dieters and his family at a fancy pants Chinese restaurant near Wangfujing shopping district and had a sumptuous dinner of peking duck.  Several other people joined us, including Mr. Chen, the new assistant facilities manager in Beijing, Jenny (Mark's furniture vendor), Jenny's mother, and Jenny's month-old daughter, and lastly, Dave Peterson the Beijing office general manager.  We had some wine (a first since being in China because the wine is known for being made with fake alcohol (?) and generally not a good idea), several good Chinese dishes, the peking duck (so good!), and traditional Beijing desserts like green pea ice cream.