Day 19: Welcome to Xi'an!

We arrived in Xian at 5:30am. We received an abrupt wake up call in the form of the door being violently thrown open and the lights being turned on. Our group sluggishly made our way out and over to the hotel. Turns out there’s no traffic at 6am on Sunday, even in China. We had the whole morning free which I think every one of us used to shower and nap.

Inside of our hotel was a giant 12 foot statue of Guan Yu. For those of you who are unfamiliar, Guan Yu was a famous general during the time of the first emperor. He is also a very popular character in the video game Dynasty Warriors, and book series Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Ryan’s nerd instincts kicked in instantly when he saw the statue and spent the rest of the day squeeing with delight that we had a giant Guan Yu statue in our hotel. Side note: When Ryan read what I had written there he didn't agree that a 12 foot tall warlord so badass they depict him eating goat heads for breakfast would approve being "squeed" over. He asked for a more manly way to describe the fact that he spent the entire day grinning and bouncing with delight. I couldn't think of any. =)

Giant Guan Yu Statue inside Xi'an Hotel

We met for lunch at noon and went to the small Wild Goose Pagoda. It was a nice peaceful temple area. We were able to wander around. 

Small Wild Goose Pagoda, Xi'an

The highlight of the day though was the dinner and show in the evening. We went to a dinner theater where we saw three whole rows of Wendy Wu tour groups. Xi'an is one of those cities that is included on pretty much every tour offered so there were people on one week, two week, all different kinds of tours. Dinner was a collection of dumplings. They were fantastic and they were all made into different shapes. If it was a port dumpling they made it into the shape of a pig and the fish dumpling was a fish and they even had chicken and a peacock dumpling. It was soooooo good.

Character dumplings for dinner

The show was a series of music and dances from the Tang dynasty. During that time they were apparently very much into big sleeves and sparkly hair ornaments. They had gorgeous costumes. It wasn’t as good as the other show we had seen but it was very fun.