TongJie slept in until 7:00 this morning, but the rest of us were awake earlier. I'm glad he was able to get a good night's sleep because he's been getting worn out by the end of our days. We had some time between breakfast and meeting up with our group at 10:00, but it was raining and the boys really just wanted to play with their cars in our hotel room so that's what we did. We were supposed to see the ancient Xi'an city wall this morning, but apparently they close it when it's raining a lot because it gets slippery, so our schedule changed a little. We instead went to the Wild Goose Pagoda this morning, which we were going to do tomorrow morning, so we just ended up with a fuller day today because we still went to the city wall but it was in the afternoon instead, after it stopped raining. The Wild Goose Pagoda was pretty amazing architecturally but I think the boys thought it was kind of boring. Our guide, Tony, said that a pagoda is like a Buddhist library, used for storing historical documents and teaching. There were a lot of other buildings that we saw with the pagoda as well and they were all really beautiful. After the pagoda, we walked a long ways through a sort of downtown area that had a lot of shops and restaurants around the edges of a huge central area with lots of neat statues, fountains, trees, and food trucks. We even saw a taco truck. As we were walking, we stopped at a grocery store and let the boys pick out a snack. Peppa Pig seems to be really popular in China, we keep seeing Peppa Pig everything all over the place, so they each chose Peppa Pig fruit snacks. We had lunch with our group at a dumpling restaurant with the most dumplings of different varieties that I have ever seen. They kept bringing more and more dumplings to our table and they were really good! TongJie liked the shrimp dumplings the best, Ezekiel liked the pork and vegetable dumplings, and I liked the mushroom ones and also the pork and vegetable dumplings, but they were all excellent! I don't remember which were Jeff's favorite and I can't ask him because he's not here right now. We also had soup with tiny dumplings in it that the boys liked a lot as well. Our whole family sat at the "kids' table" for lunch - they are a fun group to hang out with!
After lunch, we stopped at a huge market but we didn't walk very far into it because we only had 30 minutes to spend there and there were shops everywhere with just the kind of trinkety things that TongJie and Ezekiel love to look at! TongJie bought a coin and Ezekiel bought a pocket watch with a horse on it - they are both very proud of their purchases. Ezekiel has been using his watch to announce to everyone what time it is every few minutes. We also bought a few other small things.
After the market, it had stopped raining so we went to the ancient city wall of Xian. Xian is an interesting city because it has so much ancient history but it has also become very modern. In the ancient times Xian was actually the capital city of China before it moved to Beijing, and it has a city wall that surrounds the old part of the city. The wall is about 8 miles around and it is flat on top. They have bikes that people can rent to ride around the wall, but unfortunately only adult-sized bikes so our family did not participate in riding the bikes. TongJie was pretty disappointed because he really wanted to ride a bike. Our family and another young man from our group were the only ones (besides our guides) who didn't ride bikes, so we walked together along one stretch of the wall and took pictures. The sun had come out by then and it was really pretty. It was interesting to see all of the ancient architecture on the inside of the wall with a backdrop of modern skyscrapers on the outside. Sarah got an Uber to take us back to our hotel earlier than everyone else so we didn't have to wait around for the bike riders, which was nice. The boys were ready to be back in our hotel room by then! Jeff went to a concert this evening (called the "Tang Dynasty Music and Dance Show") with some others from our group, so the boys and I had a quiet evening in our room. They aren't back from the concert yet so I don't know what it was like. Today was another long day, but I'm kind of glad we had the schedule change and that we won't be going to the pagoda tomorrow morning. TongJie and Ezekiel really want to go to the Vanguard department store again, so we'll be able to do that in the morning before we leave to take the bullet train to Chengdu in the afternoon.
Pictures are of the Wild Goose Pagoda this morning with some of our friends from our group, Travis and Kendra, and also at the market with TongJie and Ezekiel showing off their new purchases.
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