Wuhan 10-12-2010

i can't remember when i last emailed.. but we left xian last night after spending the day at the terracotta warriors. i don't remember telling you about that.. we took a city bus from the train station for 7 yuan which is a dollar which we thought was pretty amazing. an hour later, we were at the terracotta warrior museum which is up in the mountains kind of. it's interesting because you pass all of these trees and the fruit is covered with individual ziplock looking bags. you can't tell what it is from the bus but then when we got to the museum, there were a bazillion stands lining the roads and they turned out to be pomegranates. i bought one on our way back down, but anyway.. once you get up to the top of the hill and to the museum itself, the buildings are made out of pretty stone and the landscaping is really nice. it has a different feel than everything else we had seen so far. we started at the exhibition hall and saw some of the artifacts and then we went to the smallest pit and ended up at the largest one. it was smaller than you would imagine from pictures.. but really impressive. there were rows and rows of soldiers in front and then a lot of unearthed rows behind them. i got a lot of pictures, hope they turn out whne theyre blown up.

i've been taking lots of pictures in general but won't be able to upload them until i get home. i was worried about my battery not lasting and having no way to charge it, but it's been fine so far.

anyway in the evening we went to the muslim quarter and got a bunch of different food. dumplings and that meat on a rotating spit thing and persimmon cake things and kebabs. there were lots of vendors in the streets selling nuts and dried fruit and walnut powder. we had a good time there looking at everything.

so then last night we got on an overnight sleeper train and ended up in wuhan where guillermos friend phil from college is living/working. he's nice. kind of quirky. he speaks in simple sentences as all long time english teachers abroad seem to do. we're staying at his apartment tonight and then we just bought tickets to shanghai for tomorrow night. they only had hard seat tickets but im hoping we'll be able to upgrade once we get on the train. the bathrooms on the trains are preeetty rough. saw a bunch of things i never wanted to see. but we loved the sleeper train last night. it's nice to be able to stretch your legs out. and it comes with a pillow and a heavy blanket which is pretty comfy. i think we each slept 6 or so hours.

in wuhan we met up with his friend after a bank/taxi/lunch fiasco. i yelled for the first time all trip. get a little grouchy when i haven't eaten, and we hadnt eaten anything since 4 or 5 the previous day and it was then 1 pm. we stopped at mc donalds for a quick burger, i'll admit it. but it was an emergency. but then a really nice girl at a bank let us use someones computer to get online and she also gave us directions to the city bus that would take us to the university phil teaches at. an hour and 1 yuan later, we got to the university and met up with him. we just went to a big restaurant and now we're thinking about going out to some western bar. we haven't gone out at all so far and guillermo is itching to go.