I'm beginning to like this city! The main reason possibly being that food is so much easier to get here - there are mountains of places to eat, so much so that pointing at stuff is easy to do when the kanji proves impossible to read...which is most of the time. Had the most incredible sweets in the Muslim quarter yesterday - beitanliangao - or something like that, sticky ricey coconutty stuff with loads of sweet syrupy stuff on. Hao chi!
Today I went to the Terracotta Warriors. Not as mind-blowing as the Great Wall but still very impressive. The statues are amazingly well-preserved after 2000-odd years, I just wish more of the weapons were on display.
The most interesting part of the day was definately the market I went round with a Greek guy called Guillaume (?). Apart from boring stuff like fish there were turtles, massive big frogs, mini-lobsters going crazy in their boxes, and creepiest of all were the seasnakes, seething masses of wiggliness crammed into glass tanks. One stallowner who tragically didn't let us take photos was COVERED in blood, as one by one he pulled out a snake, pierced its head on a nail attached to a long piece of wood, and sliced the body along its length, gutting the snake and throwing still-moving head and one half of the body into a slowly-dying box of other snakes. WOW. Asia is definately interesting.
