We've finally found China...

Steph:

And we've found it in Xi'an! After our very comfortable night train out of the newly built, cleaned up, westernised, Beijing, we found the dirty, NOISY, polluted, smelly and BRILLIANT Xi'an! It's great here: it's real. There's food to be bought every two feet: dumpling snacks for 5p! Chris was in heaven this morning at the sight of so many little shops with steamers out front piled and piled with different dumpling varieties!!! We have to get our pointer cards out to explain we'd like 'pork' or 'vegetables' please! Price lists all in Chinese and no understanding between us; we've had some hilarious cafe experiences involving a lot of pointing and guesswork.

For me, I feel Xi'an maybe represents China as far as cities go-at least moreso than Beijing. (We don't pretend to have even seen real REAL china yet - how can we when we've only been in cities so far?)

Xi'an is a city of dodging... People dodging people, dodging cars, dodging crazy, speedy bus drivers, dodging motorbikes, taxis, people, people, people! There are people EVERYWHERE! All over the streets, in each others' way, always!

Last night (GCSE results day- eek! I hear Counthill did extremely well, v v pleased, though yet to hear from any of my individuals) we took the night train from Beijing to Xi'an which was a very pleasant experience, I must admit. We're used to the six bunk cabins in France which are clean but definitely tired. This is what we wanted here in China but there were no more 'hard sleeper' tickets left and we had to buy 'soft sleper' in the end -the apparently slightly more luxurious option but we've yet to see the hard sleeper. Anyhow, it was extremely luxurious as far as we were concerned: relaxing music playing through speakers, golden, silken décor, huge pot noodles to be bought with a man in uniform coming to replenish your cabin's teapot with hot water!! Hmmm, we're on a hard sleeper on Sunday night all the way to Shanghai and don't expect the same luxury!

We went by bus to see the Terracotta Warriors today - what a sight!! An amazing sight and really made me want to try my hand at the old archeology malarky.

Was great to see people still excavating, chipping away. Chris will write more on this '8th wonder of the world' (Jacques Chirac) no doubt, but for now, it's back to the 40p bottle of beer for me in the chilled, tranquil hostel bar.

Have a great weekend everyone- ciao for now, love Steph x x x