Third part

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After a long and rather boring trainride we arrived at Xi'an at 7 in the morning. Free of charge we were driven to the hostel, so everything went as planned. We got our rooms, again we had a single room with two beds, TV, and our own toilet with shower (the shower sucked by the way), but paid somewhat less this time. A drop from ca. 32 $ to 24 $ pr. night.
With all that in order, we can take a more general look at the city.

Xi'an has been the capital of china for several hundred years more than one thousand years ago. And this can be seen in various places around the city. But on the other hand is Xi'an, along with the rest of the country, in an exceptional developing time with scyscrapers competing for the space. So what you see in this city is two very different eras meeting. You see the old city wall, still intact, all the way around the city core (it's 14 km long and 18 m wide at the base), with an enourmous amounts of cars passing through every day, the drum and bell tower surrounded by megamalls and the terracotta warriors as one of chinas most visited touristattractions.
After having been very active in beijing for a whole 9 days, we needed some time to relax. And the hostel we stayed at seemed suited for this purpose. There was tabletennis in the basement, a dvd-room with a pretty big collection of movies and cheap beer.
It's is a common thing for writers to write only of the extraordinary things that happen to the characters of the story, but that way doesn't always justifies things. For we used 90 % of our time just sitting and enjoying ourselves in the very hot days, and the rest on actually tourism.
We meet some nice people (and saw with them the worst CL final at 3 in the morning, but that's a whole other story). All in all, Xi'an was for us, a time of relaxing. We did see the terracotta warriors, but more because we had too. Don't get me wrong, the terracotta warriors are one of the most exceptionel mausoleoms in the world (even compared to the pyramids) but the amount of tourists didn't exactly make it a good trip.

The pictures from Xi'an will not come for some time, but next time I will write about Emei Shan, what that is you will soon learn

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