Sunday, August 28, 2011

City of Xi'an


The city of Xi’an is definitely a beautiful one. The city has thousands of years of ancient history. The two days we stayed in this city we visited a few different attractions. In our free day we visited the Great Mosque. I really enjoyed visiting this pace because it opened my eyes about the world. Honestly, I really didn’t know there were Chinese Muslims Their mosque was really beautiful, and their architecture had many flowers which shows the impact Islam had. We walked along the markets in the mosque, where some of the poor were begging for money or the people trying to make a few yuan in their small shops, bargaining with the locals and the tourists.




Also in the this day, we visited the ancient drum and bell towers. After we visited Xi’an’s City Wall, the wall that once protected the city like the Great Wall. This wall w rode bicycles on for a while, which was really fun. All of us were racing or helping Michael with his bike. I really felt like I was in China then because bicycling is definitely one of the most essential sources to the Chinese people. They either ride it to get to their job, to school, for leisure, or for whatever reason.

The next day in Xi’an, we visited the terracotta soldiers, which I was really excited for because it’s something in our history books. A farmer found these thousands of soldiers in the 1970s. And ever since then, the city build a museum around it. It is believed to have protected a king in the first dynasty, because his mausoleum wasn’t so far from these soldiers. It was supposed to protect him in the “afterlife.” I couldn’t believe that this was an onsite museum, and the restoration of the soldiers looked well done. The idea of what happened to the soldiers and the secrecy of them really interested me. Archeologists determined that someone tried to burn the soldiers because of the ash found, and they were once protected because of the roof pillars. I really enjoyed seeing the soldiers, something also astonishing was how fast the once “countryside’ of Xi’an where the soldiers were found evolved so fast and became more city-like and touristy.

Overall, I had a lot of fun visiting the historical sites, and the five star hotel was great. The train ride from Xi’an to Nanjing really opened my eyes also because I was able to see the countryside, and people with small houses that were crumbling and abandoned, lots of garbage, many crops, and people working really hard far away from the city. 

Alex

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