Xi'an City Wall 西安城墙

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Two Dutch guys from my hostel and I decided to check out the Xi'an city wall. Over one thousand years old, the city wall is 12 meters high, 12-14 meters across the top,15-18 meters thick at bottom and 13.7 kilometers to walk all the way around. It's one of the oldest defense systems in the world.

It's quite popular to rent bicycles and ride around the wall. We looked into doing it, but with the holiday crowds, traffic on the wall was a bit heavy and there was a wait for bikes. I think they raised the prices for the holiday crowds as well.

We opted instead to walk around about a quarter of it. By the time we'd done that, we were satisfied with our wall experience and went in search of water. Not surprisingly, there's little shade atop the wall, and the direct sunlight had made us all much warmer than anticipated. Many people tell me that this is one of their favorite memories in Xi'an. I'm not sure if I missed anything special because I didn't see all of it, but while I did enjoy what I saw, I'm not sure I'd want to spend a few hours seeing more of the same.

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