Day 11

Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Today was a relax and travel day. Jason got up early this morning and came into our room to see if anyone wanted to go with him to go for a walk along the river and watch people do Tai Chi. My mom got up and went with him and they went over to the trunk of Elephant Trunk Hill.

This is them at the trunk. 

They also were able to see some people doing Tai Chi and Jason took some video of them.

After the rest of us got up we went to breakfast and then all just relaxed until we had to go to the airport to go to Xi'an. I wasn't feeling very well and felt like I was coming down with a cold. We had no cold medicine and had no clue what to buy in mainland China because everything was in Chinese. We finally managed to communicate through coughing and sniffing and miming what it was we were looking for and bought some medicine at the airport having no idea what it really was or what was in it.  

We hadn't eaten lunch so we looked around for some food in the airport. There wasn't much to find and after bringing back some snickers and Ho Ho's for all of us, Jason and Jacob reported that they were able to find some cup of noodle things and asked if we wanted some. So we started eating these huge cup of noodles and then they started boarding the plane. Normally we would have just finished our food and boarded last, but we had tons of carry on luggage and if we didn't board at the beginning, we might have run the risk of it not all fitting. So my parents boarded, because they had shared theirs and were finished, while the rest of us tried to down the rest of ours. The problem was that it was SO hot, I ended up throwing most of the broth of mine away.

We arrived in Xi'an in the late afternoon. We were all kind of dragging, I think we were all still really tired. Lee was the name of our tour guide and she was really cool. Her English was excellent and she told us a bit about Xi'an and it's history. I was a little tired and didn't pay too much attention. 

We finally made it to our hotel and checked in. It was a little bit of a fiasco because my parents asked for a different room and they did but it was on a smoking floor and my mom is allergic to smoke. So we went back down to ask to change the room again and found out that the original room had also been on a smoking floor and that all of us kids were on a smoking floor. They told us that all the non-smoking rooms were taken but my dad said that it was a health issue and that they needed a non-smoking room, so they found one of them. 

The hotel was nice. It was pretty big. 

This was the pool in the back. It had this really cool wall that looked over the water of the pool. We didn't go swimming but it was kind of fun to look at. 

After we got everything with rooms figured out and we settled in, we went for dinner in the hotel at their Chinese restaurant. Then we went back to our rooms and hung out a bit before we went to bed.