Xi'an - The original capital of China

---

We are sitting at the airport waiting to board our flight to Xi’an. This is the first airport we’ve been in without a Starbuck’s. Taiyun is not a tourist hub.
We arrived at noon and were met by our new guide, James. I got good vibes and was proved correct. He is the best educated of the 3 guides we’ve had and has good English. The first stop was lunch which was the best meal we’ve had with hot pepper laden miniature pork ribs as the centerpiece. The menu was in Chinese, but it had big pictures and James would explain what was what so we actually had some input into what we ate. Some of the tables were filled with tourists, but many were filled with people who looked and sounded like local customers. We were seated outside a private room where a group of businessmen were having lunch. They kept shouting what we thought might be numbers. Jack thought they were playing a version of rock-paper-scissors and I thought it was a sales rally. I wished I actually knew what was going on.
We then spent a couple of hours at the provincial museum which covers the time period during which Xi’an was the capital of China. It starts with the earliest man in China who lived 1,150,000 years ago through the end of the Tang Dynasty in 700 CE. They have some of the terracotta soldiers on display and you can get much closer to them than will be possible when we visit the site tomorrow. It was a great museum and we learned a lot. Once again there was a screaming match between two Chinese people. It was so heated that the people had to be restrained or they might have come to blows.
Since it was only 4 we visited the Big Wild Goose Pagoda. It was built during the Tang Dynasty of brick and the mortar was based on sticky rice. The Pagoda is 7 stories tall and we walked around the building and adjacent gardens. There are about 100 monks who currently live in the Temple Complex. We are now at the Hyatt after James got us upgraded to a junior suite. Jack and I joked that it means we can leave our laundry to dry in a bathroom that we don’t have to use so we don’t have to take it down to bath.

---

Photos

Regional Museum in Chengdu
From when Chengdu was the capital of China