In fact we were probably a bit raucous as the girls had acquired some portable speakers so we could continue our party and games and chit chat late into the evening. After bed time I stayed up a little longer with Anton and few beers and talked more things China. Only when we started getting complaints from others in our groups about the noise did we finally go to bed. Woke up in the morning and stepped out onto the platform of Xian, which arrived a little earlier than expected.
Exiting the train station, we saw the old city wall right in front of us and many people hanging around on the square waiting to buy a train ticket. This is common at most major railway stations. Taxi's took us too our YMCA hotel, where if you damage
anything you pay, because it is private! Other hotel are government managed and do not suffer this indecency. Given the short amount of time Anton thought it best to guide us around personally, rather than let us do our own thing as is standard. So he took us up the street to the bell tower before catching a cab to the city wall. The wall is from the time when Xian was the capital of China, though I can't remember when that is. It is in fact one of a few complete city walls in China and was the largest that I saw. I recall that the area is 12-16 square kilometre, and the wall is 20 meter wide at the top, 30 meter wide at the bottom with guard houses and other building dotted around the perimeter. The usual trick is to hire a bicycle and cycle around on the Wall. So as a group we cycled casually around the wall stopping at the generals offices to view the inside of some 
of the building and some old military artifacts. Continuing on to the opposite side of the city we stopped there to save time, thus completing only half of the full circumference of the wall. As we stopped a group of traditional military guards walked passed us, for our phototainment.Descending down off the wall again passed the fake old city recreated for tourists, we walked a country mile to a restaurant for a feed. This time sweet and sour pork was ordered for those that had enough of the 'exotic' food (I can't imagine a more boring chinese dish than sweet and sour, but anyway!), and many cups of tea later we left again.
In the afternoon we headed to the Muslim district were there is an old Mosque from again a long time ago. These thing can of course been search on the internet if you
are interested. This was actually very interesting as it was built by Chinese Muslims in 742 AD and bears a much closer architectural relationship to Chinese Buddhist temples than Muslim Mosque, while retaining many of the strucutural ideas of Mosque. A true mixture of religious culture into something that is wholly unto itself. I found this very intriguing watching chinese muslims walking around and conveniently they were called to pray while we were there. However there was no access to the prayer hall for visitors. The Muslim area also contains a tourist market around the Beiyuan Mei Islamic street, with some very cheap terracotta warriors if you want them, though I think you can get then even cheaper in Beiing. Here I was lured into a shop by a young lady who liked my hat. A big wide brimmed straw thing that on of the members in my group had bought for someone else but his head was too big for it. Given that my head was, and still is nice and small I inherited it. She wanted to try it on and then keep it. I didn't really like so I said Okay. However just as I was leaving she changed her mind an then managed to coax me into the store. There was actually a study done 
recently that if you allow men to fondle womens clothing, the sligh buzz they might get from that is enough to make men accept a worse deal than they would normally. Hence it is no surprise that most of the stall in China and South East Asia are operated by young women. and this one managed to sell me a bad quality shirt for twice the price it should have been. This was not expensive but other places started at much cheaper prices. Flatery goes a long way, in this cut throat business world.Having bought my t-shirt for the show that night, I walked through the Muslim district and the back to the hotel, where I rested for the afternoon, reading the news paper outside my room as my room mate had gone off to see a pagoda with the key. He returned
20 min before we had to be ready for the show that evening. Anton collected us and we walked to the "Tang Dynasty Royal show" which was set in a theatre of old styling (that is an acedemic term!). Of particular interest to us was the fact that before the show we would be given a meal of dumplings, of both the decorative and tasty styles. It was all you can eat aswell and included in the price ticket for the show. The decorative dumplings were presented first in various animal and plant shape. And while these looked impressive in different colours and shapes, the taste was lacking. After that we recieved plain looking dumpling with execellent taste and these we could eat as many as we wanted. However the dumplings were so filling that we could only manage one extra portion before relaxing for the show.
While we were eating a lady came out and played the zither for about 15 minutes which was pleasant background music before the show started. The show was a typical show present to the Tang dynasty emperor and consisted of music, dancing, some acrobatics with some love stories thrown in. The costume elaborate Again a very good show, with high quality dancers and technical production
After the show, we returned to the hotel, as firecrackers went off somewhere downtown. The following day was the day of the terracotta warriors, one of the must see things in China. The warriors are about and hour and half drive out if Xian, and the tour
included a guide whose duty it was to make more money of us and talk a lot with an Chinese American accent. So before we got to the original warriors we stopped at a small house that was were the official government approved replicas of the warrior are made. You can buy models of the warrior ranging from 10cm to life size. Of course you pay a premium price in comparison to those you can buy in the market, and after we left there were many more stores selling terracotta warriors and also stated that they were officially government sanctioned. I don't know what the truth is but, I also have no need for a life size terracotta in my backyard, though I have since seen a couple in Europe.Onto the actual warriors. The first thing which impresses (an impressed me the most) is the way they are looked after. After seeing many relics in south east asia with minimal protection or investment in infrastructure, I was not expecting the elaborate
complex that the have built to enclose all the warrior in football field size buildings, accompanying museum and multiple shopping centre complexes still lying dormant. Our guide took us through the three separate pit where you could see the variety of statue types; archers, infantry and the one general, who is no encases in a glass display unit. Interesting to note is that in the design of the warriors the heads are are separate and thus each statue is able to have an individualised face, suggesting that the faces are in fact replicas of the emperors army at the time. The second thing is that unlike the gray statues that you see, in fact all the warriors were created with colour, which unfortunately disappears shortly after the warrior are uncovered . Due to this many of the warriors will remain covered until they can develop a technique to preserve the colour once the covering is removed. All that you can see of the colour are images on the wall within the complex.The whole complex is impressive in it scale and in it care exhibited to the warriors and their preservation. No doubt China will make much money out of the complex making a handsome return on investment, but it is great to see the effort and care that the Chinese are giving this piece of world history.
Leaving the complex the commercialism of the place become truly apparent, as the exit takes you past empty building after empty building which will at some stage be filled with shops to sell all manner of goods. Luckily for us they were all still empty so
that we could walk through straight back to the hotel. On the way out though, there were some hawker selling small sets of terracotta warriors at ever decreasing prices. I wasn't interested but again one of them was interested in my hat, and jokingly asked if I would swap the hat for a set of warriors. Then his friend joined him and said he couldn't do that. After a few minutes of confusion, laughter and discussion, I walked away hatless with a box of terracotta warriors. I was as surprised as anyone with the deal. We headed further towards the exit when about a minute later the guy ran after us, wishing to turn the deal around. He didn't want the hat after all, so I gave him back his warriors and I took back my. Something about wearing the hat seemed to turn people off.That was the end of two busy days in XIan and after lunch back in town we picked up our laundry, packed our bags and headed off to the train station to go to our final destination of the tour; Beijing
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