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Published: February 2nd 2007
Classic China Skyline
Top of historical building once used by an emperor, background, huge craine.Xi'an, the home of the famous Terracotta warriors and smokey hotel rooms. So luckily our hotel wasn't totally booked at midnight when we arrived, but our room still smelled like someone with really bad body odor had chain smoked and maybe peed on the floor of the bathroom. The bathroom smelled so weird that I basically threw up in my mouth a little the first time I inhaled in there. It wasn't strictly bathroom stink, it was weirder. Upon arrival we booked our room as well as a tour for the next morning. We went to bed right away and got up early to have some breakfast before the tour.
Luckily we had an english speaking tour guide even if it was really hard to understand what she was saying. There were only 3 of us on the tour, me and Aaron with a nice Canadian guy. If you can believe it, it was freezing cold again and there were even frozen loogies on the ground, better than fresh I guess. Our tour started out at a museum in which Aaron took just one picture of some statues, that ended up costing him 20 yuan ($3 US!) cause it doesn't
Does it look cold?
Cause its supposed to be hot springs... say no pictures, they just charge you if you happen to take one! This guy actually said to Aaron "Show me the money" haha. The museum was of little interest and we went from there over to an old palace type area that was famed for its hot springs, which some had actually frozen over. We went then up to a tomb where the king had even buried his concubines alive so they would go to the afterlife with him! Apparently he had this crazy underground palace that no one had ever seen or opened, strange...(at this place we were again conned into paying a small fee to get driven around the sites in a golf cart...arggg)From there, not very surprisingly, our guide took us to a jade factory to try and get us to buy some crap, we weren't takers, and then she took us to lunch where the staff tried their hardest to get us to buy the most expensive thing on the menu. Instead we got chicken, and every piece had big bones in it, I have no idea where it was from on the chicken. Finally we went to the warriors, they were spectacular, a huge
Aaron wishing on the Lion...
I think he wished to be back in Thailand... stadium sized room filled with 6,000 life size warriors! Wow. Some of them had been uncovered almost in pristine condition, but most were completely demolished and lie in pieces in the bottom of the pits. I still can't believe that they were only discovered in 1976! It was surprising that our tour actually ended there and we weren't taken to any other tourist traps.
The next day Aaron wasn't feeling great so we took our sight seeing easy and headed out into town on another disgustingly grey and cold day. That morning was another low for us on the trip, we actually were extremely happy eating McDonald's, it was clean, warm and tasty, and not super smokey, something we had so much trouble finding anywhere else. We started off with a look at the drum tower, then the bell tower, the big museum there, and finally the big wild goose pagoda- I have no idea why its called that, and went home. Just a side note about the photos, the grey in the sky wasn't fog, it was one of the driest cities ever, it was pollution, our noses were filled with black boogers, ewwwww. That night we left
Dancing to the Monty Python music
NO joke, I swear that they were dancing to music on the Monty Python and the Holy Grail soundtrack. Xi'an, with train tickets that we'd bought ourselves! (too bad they were for the hard seat class, and we were really worried about upgrading them to sleeper tickets) But none the less, we didn't have to pay any scoundrels commission for buying them for us, we waited in the line for over an hour, just to get the wrong thing! Luckily our hotel staff wrote a note for us requesting an upgrade and it actually worked when we got onto the train.
PS If you want to keep updated with us even if we aren't writing in our blogs you can take a look at our photos at www.pairedhearts.com
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