Xi'an - In Search of a Bar

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After an awful night’s sleep with a very loud family below us, the father texting all night with the volume up full and of course the hacking up phloem and their boy who none stop chatted to no one in particular with the most horrendous voice ever, we arrived in Xian.

Off the train we got into a mass of people and onto a local bus with even more people and we headed into the city walls. We annoyingly got off one stop earlier than we were meant too but we finally found our hostel in good time, sweating buckets once again. Our hostel, Shuyuan Youth Hostel was really nice, it had gorgeous courtyards and a lovely bar and restaurant (including a pizza oven). We thought we’d be cheeky and to save money we booked 2 beds in a 3 bed room hoping no one would join us. The plan worked with them charging us an extra 10yn each (1 quid). So we had 3 beds and a brand new bathroom for 90 yn.

After a shower and some yummy food we headed out for a venture through hot Xian. We took in the Bell Tower dated from 12th century and later rebuilt in the 1700s, the bell was rung at dawn, across the street is another tower called the Drum Tower where the Drum signalled dusk. Next we ventured around the Muslim Quarter., which was amazing, the streets here are lined with food stalls everywhere and of course souvenir stalls.

As we were getting rather hot and sweaty we decided to find a bar to cool down in, it took a while but we finally found a wicked roof top bar with a great vantage point of the organised chaos that is China’s road/traffic system - there was traffic lights to control the traffic, but China being China they had Police doing the same job and pavement attendants’ telling the pedestrians when to cross although the green lights informs us of that, to top it off it appeared that the police were sponsored by KFC as the large umbrellas to provide shade in the unbearable sun were from KFC!

Our next day in Xian was an exciting one, we were heading out to see the Army of Terracotta Warriors. We booked on a tour via the hostel, for 160yn we had a wonderful guide, transport, video of the army on the way there, Kung Fu Panda on the way back, entrance fee and a tour of the factory where they make the souvenir models. We also stopped off for lunch which wasn’t included, but for 25yn (about 2 quid) we had the biggest buffet lunch anyone could imagine, well worth the money. The tour worked out about 5 quid more expensive than doing it yourself and included all the above extras. We highly recommend it.
For those of you who don’t know, the Army of Terracotta Warriors is a life size army that that silently stood in battle formation over the soul of China’s first unifier (Qin Shi Huang) for over two millennia before being discovered in 1974 by a farmer drilling a well.

Once we got there and had a look around the pits (going backwards, 3,2,1), although extremely fascinating we couldn’t help feel slightly deflated. Don’t get us wrong, it was totally amazing to see them but we couldn’t stop expecting something more. The display of them was rather odd and there were a lot less than we were expecting, it was a shame you couldn’t get near them for a really good photo too. We would definitely recommend to anyone to take a tripod as the light is poor in the pits, we forgot to had to rely on balancing our camera on the railings.

After a few hours we headed back to Xian where on the evening we ventured out to find some bars but no luck, we found one that in the loos lived the bar’s cat (which by the way was sitting on the bar) we then found another one that wouldn’t let us in because we were in flip flops and the last bar we ended up paying English prices for a small bottle of beer, after recovering from the shock of spending 3 quid on a beer, we headed straight back to the hostel for cheap beer and pizza.

We didn’t really do much on our last day in Xian, we ventured around the Muslim Quarter again to pick up some souvenirs, stumbling on the Old Folk House, a historic residence that serves as an art gallery, entertainment centre and tea house. Originally home to the Qing bureaucrat Gao Yuesong. Here is where there’s an art academy where there were some beautiful paintings, which of course G couldn’t resist purchasing!!!!

Xian is a lovely little town to potter around in, we didn’t do all the sights you can do here because we were in the mood to just chill out. Even though we weren’t overwhelmed by the Army of the Terracotta Warriors, don’t let our opinions put you off going, we met people to where totally overwhelmed by the whole experience and highly recommended it to everyone they met, like we do too.

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