Xi'an pictures

I was trying to wait for all the pictures to be collected on a single hard drive, but that doesn't look like it will happen anytime soon. So I will give you what I have.

This is a photo of all us that went and our former student/tour guide extraordinaire, Jackie. From left, Emily, Pip, Michelle, me, Jackie

Big Wild Goose Pagoda. Nearly 2,000 years old and in the exact center of Xi'an. No idea about the name.

Terra-cotta warrior army. When one of the Emperors of the Tang Dynasty died, he had an army of terra-cotta warriors buried with him to accompany him to the afterlife. These were all hidden underground and forgotten about until a farmer trying to dig a well discovered them in the 1970's.



Close up of one of the warriors. This one is an archer. All of the terra cotta warriors had different facial features. No two among the thousands are alike.

This about sums up Spring Festival...

This is what has been going through the mind of every lao wai or foreigner for a while now.

Click to make it bigger.

Xi'an

I apologize for the delay in the posts here. Xi'an was absolutely amazing and easily the best trip I have gone on since I have been in China. However, travel during Spring Festival is to be avoided at any and all costs as we got back a day and a half late on a 15 hour train rather than a 2 hour flight....right into the start of a new session.

Xi'an is an ancient city, one of the four ancient capitals of China, so as such it looks more "Chinese" than ultra-modern, stainless steel and high rise glass Beijing. I'm waiting for the pictures to be merged into one photo account and then I'll post several of the best people and places that we saw on here along with descriptions and some stories.

internet

For whatever reason, the internet here decided to shut off for a while, then switched to slow and unresponsive. Now it's a delightful mix of the two. I'll be in Xi'an the next few days, so I hope that issue is resolved when I get back to Beijing.

INCOMING!

Chinese New Year's is....intense. After waaaaay too much food and letting it digest a bit, we went outside to watch the fireworks and light off some of our own. American July 4th doesn't even come close. This was 360 degrees of heavy explosives streaking through the night sky for well over an hour. It wasn't set off from one central location for safety, like in America, but everyone had their own, all over everywhere and they flew all over the sky. The sounds of heavy booms and the sharp cracks of big firecrackers, along with the bright explosions, led one person to say "it was the closest to urban combat, that we'd ever come." We could look right under the fireworks and at one point, the burnt out shells from them landed at our feet. One of our coworkers had bought a box of random odds and ends from a street vendor and when we lit them off, we were surprised at the distance, size and power of the fireworks/rockets. All but the most basic of what we lit off tonight would have been illegal to buy in the US and I'm sure many safety laws were violated all over the city with nearly every one of the 20 million occupants lighting off something. The country that invented it, still has a monopoly on the biggest, loudest and brightest of them.

I have never had so much fun on New Years then I did tonight.