Terracotta Warriors

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Xi'an is lovely and our hostel is really great, its in a very traditional building and has a terracotta themed bar in the basement where we have met lots of great people. the first day we arrived in the afternoon and dumped our stuff and went to the cafe for some food and to claim our free welcome coffee, we met a french guy and a swiss guy who had just arrived too from mongolia. we all went out for a wander around the main tourist points in xi'an city, the bell tower, the drum tower and the muslim quarter. We saw some traditional shows in both towers with peope in tradtional dress playing the bells and the drums funnily enough! in the muslim quarter there were lots of people with kites and lots of street food. we walked to the great mosque before heading back towards the hostel and picking up some street food some of which was lovely and some of which was disgusting. back at the hostel we spent the evening in the bar listening to decent live music and playing/cheating at table football.
The second day we took the bus to the site of the warriors we decided against a tour as it was expensive and we had heard from people we met that it wasn't worth it. we caught the local bus and decided to get a guide to show us around although maybe we would have been better off with the audio tour as the guide seemed to be pushing all the tacky souvenirs of which there are millions! the warriors were amazing to see but we though there was more on show than there is and they have only found 1 intact everything else was broken and has been repaired. also they have stopped excavating as the warriors come out painted colourfully but the colour quickly disappears so they are waiting to develop technology to protect the colour before they dig up anymore. After taking the bus back to the hostel we headed out to the Wild Goose Pagoda to catch a light show. We were told by the reception at the hostel that it was a 30 minute walk so we set off with that in mind...an hour and 15 minutes later we arrived to find the show had finished. It was a nice park area anyway so we spent some time chilling out and taking photos before returning to the hostels terracotta warrior themed bar with our free beer tokens in hand.
The next day we booked our train tickets before going onto the top of the wall with our new found friends where we hired bikes to get around the 14km wall. Our swiss and french friends, remy and jacky, hired a tandem but the rest of us went on single bikes. The view was quite cool although slightly monotonous as we went along. The hire period was 100minutes and we made it back to the hire center after 97 of them. Phewf!! The afternoon we headed around the city looking at touristy shops and grabbed some street food that was similar to chow mein. Since it was a friday the hostel had a dumpling party where we all got to make dumplings, the chefs cooked them and we ate them. It was a good laugh and they were tasty. Needless to say we spent the evening back in the bar after the free beer ticket!
Our final day in Xi'an was spent back sorting our bags out and then heading into the muslim quarter for some final shopping. We had dinner with jacky and remy, who were also heading off that evening, before going to the train station on a crammed rush hour bus to catch our train to Pingyao.

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Photos

Hall 1
The expanse of the warriors

Kneeling Archer
The only complete one to be found so far

Kneeling Archer
Also has original paint on the rear!

The Wall
This was just outside our hostel