Xian 10-10

today began last night when we hopped on the overnight train at beijing train station. most of the seats on the train were facing one way, but we happened to be in this little cluster of 4 seats facing a table in the middle which turned out to be nice because we had a lot more room than the normal seats. sleeping in those seats was impossible though. guillermo and i took turns sleeping in eachothers lap but i think i probably slept 2 of the 11 hours. ..because of that, and the fact that it's rainy and cold in xian today, when we got back to the hostel we just camped out in the cafe and in the lobby until our room was ready at 12 and then took a much needed shower and long nap. we had breakfast here though and it was reaallly good compared to the last hostel. i forgot to write about that, but we had breakfast there one day and when we got the pancakes we ordered, they were like the size of a coaster. ridiculous. but today's breakfast was yummy and regular sized.

amazing how greasy you feel after just sitting down for a whole night, but we were feeling pretty gross. the shower is nice though. all slate with a rain shower head. and the bathroom is closer to our room than in our last hostel and most importantly, it has toilet paper in the stalls! (usually you have to carry your own with you because they don't provide it). in our last one, we had to go to the shower/kitchen area to get toilet paper and then walk to a different area to use the rest room which was kind of odd.

so tonight once we got going, we went to this restaurant that's famous for a 3.8 meter long noodle soup.. first noodle under the sun. . it's one continuous noodle and it comes in this giant bowl with just water and then it comes with 2 smaller bowls of broth that you put the noodle in. one is shark fin broth and one is hot and sour. both weren't too bad but they weren't very hot which would have helped. and we had sweet and sour chicken which guillermo was happy to discover was really similar to american chinese food. he's been on this search for orange chicken which i keep telling him he won't be able to find. but you could easily find that chicken at panda express or whatever.

after that, we went to a place that specializes in this soup called yangrou pao mou which is these two discs of bread that are really dense and you break them up into tiny pieces. the woman kept telling me to make them smaller and smaller.. and then they take your bowl back and add broth and lamb and glass noodles to it. can't say it was my fav thing. really intensely lamby. i still taste kinda lamby right now. the restaurant was lao sun jia.

tomorrow we're going to try to get ourselves to the terracotta warriors via bus. our train for wuhan leaves at 7 so it will be kind of a quick day. hoping the weather turns out better than today. it was pretty chilly. glad i have my snow bunny jacket.