Well, I survived the train - managed to upgrade to a hard sleeper in Lanzhou, 12 hours into the journey after crouching on my backpack in the aisle being stared at, tripped over and peed on (almost) by an infant (and its mother was encouraging it to pee in the aisle too!). It was interesting to see how the other half lives (and those who can afford the train are no doubt wealthier than a significant percentage of rural Chinese) but I was thrilled to be back in a sleeper.
Xi'an isn't so cold as further north, and spent what was left of yesterday afternoon wandernig around the city centre looking at an ancient Bell Tower, climbing on the walls of the city, and wandering around the Muslim Quarter for dinner. The Muslim area is a such an anomaly in this otherwise modern neon-lit city - I even found bamyen (sp?) for dinner - mmm!
Today I have been out to see numerous museums at the sites of ancient tombs, which has been fascinating but its been a long day - the Famen Temple (home to one of the fingerbones of Buddha) was the best site I saw all day with a brilliant museum. Tomorrow I am off to see the Terracotta Warriors with three people from Hong Kong I met today - quite handy having bilingual friends, we have arranged the hire of a minivan and the rest of the days details are up to us!
I had planned to write a more descriptive account of the tombs and Xi'an in general, but I think I've passively smoked enough cigarettes to poison a small elephant in the last 15 minutes and I'm getting hungry and I also need to phone the man in Beijing who has my flight ticket home (to any of you in Korla, please drop me an email if you have heard anything from David on this matter - I'm just assuming everything is A-OK). So I'll write something a bit more interesting once I'm in Beijing ...
