Thursday April 21st

Xi'an City Wall

Well!  That was different!  I wasn’t sure what to expect, but surprisingly I think I slept okay.  I don’t think I got a full night’s sleep, but I know I slept.  I remember lying down to sleep, feeling the train stop 3 times and thinking “This is going to be a long night..”, but after that I knew I had slept, waking up a few times in the middle, but before I knew it, it was morning.  We had all had a good night’s rest at least.  The beds weren’t particularly soft, nor where they really hard but they were long enough for Mathew which is what he was most concerned about, what with being so tall!

Xi'an City Wall

I got up and I decided to start the day with some Green tea which seemed to work nicely.  Shortly after that, I tucked into my two breakfast muffins which Jane had bought for us all the day before.  I nibbled throughout the morning on various things we had bought especially for the train journey.  Now my stomach seemed to be feeling fine, and for the rest of the morning I relaxed, chatted to the others, and continued drinking Green tea.  Come 12:30pm we packed our things back together and got off the train as we arrived in Xi’an railway station and met our next local guide, Bryan, who spoke really quite fast and we discovered, was Jane’s tour guide mentor.

Xi'an City Wall

Xi'an City Wall

We went to have some lunch at which I ate a decent amount of food, including some sweet and sour pork which was something I had been eating before my stomach had decided to give up on Chinese food.  Out hotel rooms weren’t ready yet (as the hotel said they would be) so we went to explore Xi’an city walls and explored them for a bit.  The architecture of the buildings within the walls are purposefully built in the style of the same age of the walls.  The walls themselves form a 9 mile (14km) long rectangle around Xi’an city centre.  They were originally built in 1370 during the reign of Hongwu, the first Ming Emperor.  

Although I hadn’t yet spent a great deal of time here in Xi’an, I decided that it was a very clean looking city, and it looked really quite nice.  Later on tonight we would have dinner, and tomorrow we would see the Terracotta Warriors.  I hoped we would stay there for a decent amount of time.  All I knew was that it was 19 miles away from where we were staying and we were leaving at 8am.  Sounds good!