Xi'an, Why Are You So Far Away?

         AND WHY THE @#$% ARE WE ARRIVING AT 5:20 AM?!?! 

If you know me, you know that I don't operate before the hours of ... morning. Let's rewind a bit... last Thursday, July 22, we departed for Xi'an at about 3 pm, and after an 11-hour train ride, arrived at 5 am earrrrrrrrrly Friday morning (yes, I know the math doesn't add up, there was other travel in the mix). Thankfully we had "beds" (planks of wood with sheets on top), so I slept about 5 hours. 

At this point, CET decided to play a little game. This game turned out to be a 12-hour scavenger hunt, which started like this. "Okay, I hope you enjoyed the train ride, see you at the hotel!" And just left us there. So after 30 minutes of scrambling around to find a taxi-driver that actually knew where our hotel was, we got to the hotel by 6:15 am ... only to get more fun games from CET. The scavenger hunt mandated that we go to 5 different historic places around the city, all before 6 pm. Then we could turn in our answers to various questions, for the chance to win 400-650 RMB for our team. Our team consisted of 5 people: me, my roommate, and three other students, one of whom was fluent in Chinese. So, at the very least, we had 2 fluent speakers of Chinese, and absolutely zero knowledge of Xi'an. (if you also have no knowledge of Xi'an, read this!)

The first place we went to was the Chinese-Muslim district, where they had some of the strangest foods I had ever seen. We had to sample three types of food, and we chose to sample burnt rice topped with black dates, a delicious fried bun filled with syrup, and a mutton soup that numbed your entire mouth (had a spice called 麻, sorry, I don't know the English, although all the dictionaries call it Hemp.... lol). Following this, we went to Starbucks and had a real breakfast, we were all half-dead from exhaustion. 

at least it was a kick-ass Starbucks...

We spent the rest of the day traveling to museums and historic sites. I'm going to condense this into a few pictures, since most of the places we went weren't super interesting, unless you love museums. (some of these pictures span two days)

We stayed in the most luxurious hotel I've ever seen.

This picture doesn't fully do it justice

We went to the city walls, which extend as far

as the eye can see. In ancient times, the walls

were 7.5 times longer than they are today ... wow.

And they had cannons, which I promptly rode...

to the great displeasure of the security attendants.

From there, we moved on to a Buddhist museum.

The actual Confucian analects tablets. 

This was kind of humbling to see.

(at a separate museum)

Ancient seals (name engravings) at another museum

These were 4000+ years old, preserved underground.

Underground remnants of pottery and such. 

By far the coolest museum, as the museum 

itself was physically located underground.

Most of this occurred during the scavenger hunt, but a few of the museum shots were from museums we went to after visiting the legendary Terra Cotta Soldiers (my next post). 

Finally, the WORLD'S BEST ENGRISH.

the back of a condom wrapper in our hotel.