City walls of Xi?an

First day in Xi'an


This morning we arrived in Xi'an and we got to our hostel walking a small de-tour. We found it quite quickly nonetheless and our room was already available. This time we would not be in a dorm, but we decided to get our own room for our last few nights.

We had a private bathroom with a glass wall, which we were very excited about. And after the long train ride we both could use a shower and some rest.
When we were clean and our energy levels were back up, we took out our map and went into the city centre looking for a stairs up the city walls. The city walls of Xi'an our totally restored and as you can see you can rent a bicycle there and bike around the whole thing. And so I did.

It was so wonderful to ride a bike again. As stupid as it sounds, but I always miss being able to right my bike on vacation and such. So I was feeling really good while biking the wall, even though it was burning hot in the sun and there was just a little breeze.

This, of course, resulted in me getting a horrible sunburn. ME! I never get sunburned. Or at least, not in the Netherlands. So maybe it was the Chinese sun? Or maybe I just shouldn't have biked around the city walls where there was no shade in the middle of the day? Who knows ;)


The trip around the wall almost took me two hours. And when I got back at the rentalplace they almost wanted to charge me extra because it took me too long. When I started to say that this was absurd and that I did not know this, there was no problem all of the sudden and I didn't have to pay extra. Chinese people...

After the biking I started looking for a supermarket and bought myself a very big bottle of water. Drank half of it and walked on to the small wild goose pagoda near the South gate of the wall. My hostel was near the North gate, so at the end of the day I had to walk back half way through the city.

I could enter the park of the pagoda for free and walked around the plants, flowers, lake and museum. It was all very nice and interesting. I didn't see many pagoda's yet, so I thought that was very pretty.

You can imagine that by the time I got back to the hostel I was exhausted. I had to take a shower because my feet were all brown. And this was not from the sun.
After the shower I didn't want to do anything anymore and my feet were a little bit upset with me. So we decided to have dinner at our hostel, drink a beer and enjoy the hostels movie night, which meant: a very big TV in the courtyard outside.
I put feet up, in the hope they will start liking me again, and enjoyed a relaxing evening.