Day 6 in China!

Hi everyone ... it's about 10:30pm on Friday -- I'm a little late in writing the blog, but we had to make sure all of our bags were packed for our flight tomorrow.  We have a very early wake-up call (5:00am!) because our flight to Qingdao leaves a little after 8:00am.   The flight shouldn't be too long though -- a little less than 2 hours -- and I'm not sure exactly what we'll do when we get to Qingdao since our new guide will have a plan for us.

Today was another great day -- we have certainly lucked out with the weather.  It's been close to 80 degrees, and mostly sunny, save for a few raindrops yesterday afternoon and this morning.  We started the day at the Terracotta Warrior Museum.  The Terracotta warriors were constructed in the Qin Dynasty (221 bce), during the reign of Qin Shu Huong Di, the "first" emperor of the Qin dynasty (he named himself the first emperor when he succeeded in uniting all of China).  As part of his burial process, he wanted the ultimate afterlife, so he forced the construction of nearly 7,000 life sized, terracotta warriors.  All of them were constructed and positioned so that his body would be protected in the afterlife.  In 1974, Chinese farmers discovered the pit, which was then officially excavated and turned into a museum.  Interest fact: the farmers weren't actually paid anything extra for their amazing find until 1998 when Bill Clinton visited the museum, and asked one of the farmers to sign a book he had purchased about the warriors.  

After the Terracotta warriors, we went for tour of Xi'an's City Wall, a 9 mile rectangular-shaped wall, built during the Ming Dynasty (1368).  For 20 yuan, most of us rented a bicycle and we biked the 9 miles around the wall!  The scenery was terrific and the weather was fantastic -- Ms. Gembala's arms are a bit sunburned again though! It was also a bit hard to take pics, but I tried!

After the tour of the city wall, we went to Xi'an's Great Mosque, a wonderfully peaceful Muslim worshipping place.  Xi'an has a population of 8 million people and about 1% of that population is Muslim.  The Mosque is actually situated in downtown Xi'an, so the students had a little time to shop around the souvenir shops in the area and practice their bargaining skills.  On our way to dinner, we saw some business men jumping rope, so a few of our students decided to join in the fun!  And, of course, because we're "Americans", lots of Chinese citizens love taking pictures with us -- enjoy the pic of Nick!

For dinner we had a "hot pot" dinner -- we were each given a small vat of boiling water and on our Lazy Susan we had a variety of meat and vegetables.  We got to cook the meat and veggies in the boiling vats!!  It was quite an experience and most everyone enjoyed it!

I will write more tomorrow night once we're all settled in Qingdao.  After Qingdao, we will head to our sister school in Jining -- we'll be there April 13-16, and I'm not sure of the schedule at all for those days, but I will definitely keep everyone posted!  Thank you so much for following along -- I enjoy the comments!!

Wanan :)