no more dumplings..

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After visiting the 100th temple / palace we decided to leave beijing and visit another city in china called xian - home to the famous terracotta army...we jumped onto our next train or rather ran for our train - traffic in beijing is horrendous what was meant to be a 30 minute journey ended up taking us an hour....being typical travellers we decided to try the hardsleeper or second class!!!! not as bad as it may sound it just means you have to share a carriage with about 100 other people and a compartment with 5 people and sleep on the top bunk of a triple bunk with no room to move....and if you are wandering what 3rd class is like its a hard seat literally!!!!

it was an experience to say the least I (naila) luckily passed out pretty much as soon as we got on the train and slept right through and woke up in xian 12 hours later - best sleep ive had yet and meant i didnt have to use the toilet on the train😊 we have been in xian the past 3 days staying in a really nice hostel near the centre by the famous city wall...where you can rent bikes and ride around the hole wall so of course we rented a bike.. a tandem bike!! yes we looked hilarious and spent the afternoon cycling around the wall...it only took us an hour and half!!!!

Yesterday Lou went to see the terracotta army and i spent the day trying to upload pictures to our blog and yes failed miserably but we hope to be able to upload more pics soon...other than that not much else to do here theres the "famous" drum and bell tower which we visited on the first day and the other attraction is the muslim quarter (yes we're everywhere lol) it is an area with lots of souvenir shops, restaurant and food stalls where you can sample the local delicacies mainly steamed buns or dumplings and other goodies such as chinese hamburgers and various meats on a stick but think we are going to give it a rest tonight and eat some pasta or something from the restaurant in the hostel...we still got another 2 months of noodles ahead of us....but thats ok as will be in warm sunshine and beach country!!

we loved the train here so much that we have booked another hard sleeper tonight to kunming but have upgraded ourselved to the middle bunk - well it is a 36 hour journey so we would like to be able to sit up for a bit...kunming is in the yunnan province of china which boarders with laos, burma and vietnam we are going to spend a few days here and then cross the boarder to laos

It has been fun exploring China loads to see do and the people are cool but we looking forward to finally being able to wear our flip flops thai fishing pants and eating a different kind of noodle

see you in laos xx

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