It was nice to wake up this morning and know that we would be able to go to sleep in the same place. In fact, we get to spend two more nights in Xi'an - so I did a massive load of sink laundry last night. As a result, our bathroom and the girls' bathroom look like something straight out of the Beverly Hillbillies.
It was nice to catch up with our travel group, even though it was only for half a day. We bumped into most of them at the hotel's buffet breakfast. The breakfasts are always interesting - the larger cities have a pretty impressive assortment of both Chinese and Western foods, while places like Fuzhou, and particularly Nanping are Chinese only. Today I was pretty excited to see a pancake. Weirdly though, ice cream is also on the breakfast menu and let me just say that Flying Sparrow picked the WRONG day to sleep in and skip breakfast.
This morning's destination was the Muslim Market, which I was pretty excited to see - and I was not disappointed. It's a huge area inside the Xi'an City Wall in which Chinese Muslims set up an extensive array of stalls and shops and sell things like goat hooves, taffy, kebabs, and even cotton candy. The Muslim population has been in China since the Silk Road days and we are told that since they helped to drive out the Mongols, they are always welcome in China. While there has been a lot of mixing in marriages, and the Muslims appear very Chinese on the surface, many have a very unusual grey eye coloring - really unusual and striking.
Muslim Market.
After the Market, our travel group once again left us behind - they headed off to Chengdu while we stay to catch up on Xi'an. We will meet back up with them on Monday in Guilin and then stay together for a few days. So we had to say goodbye to one of our favorite guides, Henry, before being turned over to our new guide, Jerry. We took a walk to a nearby restaurant for a dumpling banquet. Let me be frank: I adore dumplings. My entire family adores dumplings. After today, however, I'm going to need a day or two before I eat another dumpling. I would estimate that close to 100 dumplings landed on our table today - of incredible variety. They were amazing and unique - but they just kept coming! We could barely walk when we left.
One of what felt like 1000 baskets of dumplings. Yes - half of them are black.
So what do you do when you can barely walk after overeating delicious dumplings? Go for a nine-mile bike ride, of course. Xi'an boasts a pretty spectacular and intact city wall - which is a mere 600 years old. Originally used to defend the city, it's now a great way to explore the inner city from above. At some point in time, someone was smart enough to introduce the idea of biking around the wall, which is about 36 feet wide, which is more than enough room for plenty of walkers and bikers. We were lucky in that while it's still hot and humid, it was somewhat cloudy, so our biking wasn't uncomfortable. EXCEPT for the bikes - which were incredibly uncomfortable. Regardless, we enjoyed every minute. I teamed up with Spring Flower and T teamed up with Flying Sparrow. We laughed the entire time and even saw a wedding on the Wall.
Despite evidence to the contrary, Flying Sparrow actually did most of the pedaling.
At this point, we were pretty wiped out - but when we met back up with Jerry, he had other plans. One more stop - the Big Wild Goose Pagoda. It was worth it. The Pagoda and Temple were built by a famous monk who traveled to India and brought Buddhism to China. It's gorgeous except that the entire Pagoda is covered in scaffolding - after an earthquake it apparently started "leaning." Jerry turned us over to an "official" Pagoda tour guide, who, to be honest, was terrible. We did learn a bit about the temple but at the end of the tour there was a really hard sell to buy an array of products. We turned most down but did decide to have the girls' names done in calligraphy by a local artist.
"Spring Flower" and "Flying Sparrow." Oh - and don't you want to also lug home the $700 painting in the background?
Now we are back at the hotel and feel like limp dishrags. We stayed up a bit too late last night so I'm hoping for an early evening. I guess we do have to figure dinner out - but please don't let it be dumplings!
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