history buffs in china :)

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Hey everyone! Just thought would quikcly update the blog again since we've moved on a couple of times since the last one! Arrived safely in Xi'an after a 16 hour train journey on a hard seat (which made my bum very numb after only a couple of hours!!), managed to sleep surprisingly more than when we had the luxury soft sleepers last long journey though haha, and woke up to find Laura doing sudoku puzzles with half the train crowded around our seats learning how to play and ripping out pages of her puzzle book to do themselves!! This entertained us for the rest of the journey fortunately! Pretty happy I was able to check into the hostel - can't remember how much we said last time - but to cut a long story short in Emei Shan not only did I forget my passport and consequently have a run in with the police, although luckily they were very nice to me!! But also on our second attempt at climbing Emei we feared being stranded at the top without anywhere to sleep surrounded by scary attacking monkeys (which the Chinese tourists thought was a good idea to feed??! Not cool!! ) - obviously both these situations ended up alright and we've lived to tell the tail haha although wasn't helped by a 24 hour thunderstorm either which decided to erupt just as we stepped our feet on the peak of the mountain at about 6.45am, and the mist covered the huge golden buddha we had climbed to see hahaha we were not amused and to top it all off I thought I'd test Laura a little bit more and was sick before attempting to get the cable car down which was shut due to the bad weather (after waiting in the queue for three and a half hours!!) and finally walking down in the pouring rain! As you can see anything better than this is a success in our eyes - so we've been having the most fantastic time since!! T.I.C. Glad you liked the abbreviations Auntie Anne :) you need to update us with what's been happening over in T.I.H?! And yes Laura has been suffering from the tics too!
Might all sound a bit traumatic..and at the time was a little stressful, but we had each other and managed to laugh quite a lot - and these our the stories which make our experience so UNIQUE :) lol.

So Xi'an - we were at this really nice hostel with a really cool lively bar, we finally learnt how to play this crazy dice game all the Chinese seem to sit down and play in bars?!and met some more nice people..more Canadians!!I've been a little bit ill thanks to the pre-China tonsillitus but Laura is doing a wonderful job of keeping me drugged up every 4 hours so have been feeling much better since!Am hoping to stay this way!We visited the teracotta army - weren't too sure what to make of it as quite a few people had told us it was a hyped up tourist site but we both thought it was really incredible and really enjoyed our visit!Very worthwile!The statues were so huge and all of them so different, was amazing! And wasn't just an army - there were clay birds and acrobats too etc basically a whole other life made of clay for the afterlife!And it was kind of cool to see people working on still uncovering artefacts as they haven't fully finished exploring the site.
We've also been trying a lot of local food - Laura has dragged me to various local street markets for 'the best food in china'. So far the faves have been this quails egg stick covered in peanut satay and chilli sauce, and meat stuffed buns - basically loving the spice!I'm proud to have tried more than I'd expected!And am slowly getting back onto the meat trail..We left Xi'an this morning by train and are now in Luoyang heading to Longmen Caves tomorrow, a national heritage site! Yes it seems we're loving the history quite a bit!! before boarding another long distance train to Shanghai - really looking forward to the next adventures, can't believe we've been here for two weeks already!

Missing everyone at home, hope everything's well - the messages are literally amazing and make us very happy so please keep us updated :) and thanks to all who have messaged already!

Love Nat and Laura xxx

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