Most visitors to China go to Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong… and/or Xi’an. This was our first visit on this trip to a “tourist destination”. It was strange hearing native English spoken by other people again. We did the usual tourist things: bicycling on the city wall:
and a visit to the terra cotta warriors site, undoubtedly the biggest Xi’an attraction. On a slow day, “only” 100,000 people visit the site; the record has been almost half a million. Half a million! On one day! A staggering number…. Hard to imagine until you’ve been there.
The vast majority of visitors are Chinese; it looks like the government develops and promotes tourist sites in order to churn the internal economy…. making it each Chinese citizen’s patriotic duty to get on a green bus to visit these locales which are surrounded with acres of restaurants, snack bars, souvenir shops and vendors of “genuine” artifacts. The site is truly extraordinary… almost as much for its commercialism as for its historic and artistic significance, which is in no way trivial.
We also spent a day visiting the nearby blueberry fields owned and managed by Steven Ding, a school friend of Zeng’s.
Steven mined Henry for blueberry-growing wisdom, and in return treated us like royalty, including dinners with some of his friends that were sublime but left us without appetite for a couple of days.
A few other images from our time in Xi’an.
Next we will visit Xining, only because it is the furthest city to the west you can get to on the bullet train in less than a full day.
Emerald Isle to the Norse Lands 