xian - home of karaoke and some bits of pottery

We had our first experience of a sleeper train chinese style. during chinese new year. oh my god. I have never seen chaos like beijing train station! The evil mini bus driver wouldn' take us to the station itself so we had to walk with all our luggage to the madness of the waiting room. We eventually boarded our train and found our beds. 6 bunk beds to a compartment. not much else. not enough room to swing a proverbial cat.

We were lucky and with two other people from our group, we had one of the bottom bunks so had somewhere to sit, and soon passed the time. A beer trolley came past that we were very excited to see. Made sleeping and using the train squat toilets much more bearable.

After 14 long hours we arrived in Xi'an. Another large city, although nowhere near the size of beijing. It's a really interesting city, the main area is contained within city walls, the only remaining intact city walls in china apparently. There is also a muslim quarter with lots of interesting street food and tea shops to explore.

Xian is one of the only cities in china to still be surrounded by city walls. so on or first day we climbed up and walked round a section of the wall, stopping for the odd snowball fight

in the evening our tour guide decided to take us to the karaoke bar, so after a few warm up beers we arrived at what appeared to be a swish five star hotel, only to discover that this was karaokee China style!! you pay to get your own room and then waiters bring you food...and drink! whilst everyone sings away to their fvourite songs.....once we worked out how to get english on the computer.

it was interesting to note the difference between the chinese karaoke groups and the western tourist ones. On a trip to the bathroom on the next corridor i could still hear a beautifully out of tune rendition of I Believe I Can Fly from our group, couldn't hear a peep from the room next door to the bathroom....

The next day was our trip to the terracotta warriors, about an hour outside Xian. The warriors are in 3 separate pits, of varying sizes. Pit 1 is the most impressive and really has to be seen to be believed. The warriors are immense, life size and in perfect rows. Each one has a different face too which considering how many there are is hard to get your head around! You can also see the areas that are still waiting to be excavated, they have stopped work for now as they are trying to develop a way of unearthing the warriors without losing their colour, as the warriors are coloured until the oxygen reacts with them, so after a day or two in the open air they lose their colour and are just clay coloured. After a couple of hours looking around the various exhibitions we headed back to Xian for a much needed night at the local hostel for some pool and beers.

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