Xi'an Day #9 City Wall, Pagoda Park, and Day #10

At 8am we headed to Xi'an's city wall to watch the older people exercising. We only caught the end of it and saw some ladies doing exercise routines with swords and I wish we were able to see more. There was a statue nearby of a lady exercising with a sword so perhaps it's an ancient custom. Here we are at the bottom entrance of the city wall with a very authentic-looking soldier:
Xi'an use to be the capital of China before Beijing and so it had a city wall going around it to protect the city. Here we are at the entrance at the bottom of the wall:

A short climb up the stairs to the top of the wall and here's (back row) dad, Luke, me, Ben, and mom. Front row is Becca, Rachel, Eva, Nicholas, and Spencer:

On the wall, we could rent bikes to ride all the way around the top for a total of 14 km(about 10 miles). You can really see the pollution, which actually prevented us from getting sunburned on these 95+ degree days.

I didn't know if Nicholas and I would make it, but it was pretty flat and we really had a good time. I enjoyed seeing the city all around.

You can see we had a little basket in the back for our stuff and towards the beginning, Nicholas' water bottle had fallen out without us knowing. Fortunately, his kind uncle found it along the way and returned it to Nicholas after the bike ride. Nicholas was quite thirsty and gladly took it and was about to take a big drink when he noticed a dead lizard had been put in it! Gotta love uncles and their practical jokes!

My parents venturing out on a tandom bike:

Squat toilets, gotta love 'em. This one is actually a really nice one:

We saw a few too many very dirty public bathrooms.

After hitting an Indian restaurant for lunch we headed over to The Wild Goose Pagoda. You can see the big pagoda in the background that was originally built in 652. The large fountains in front of it are about 7-8 layers long. Here you can see 2 layers. So it was a really long fountain and at noon the water would shoot out to classical music, ending with William Tell's Overture:

Here's me in the middle of it:

You can see Nicholas and Spencer getting cooled off in the middle of the picture:

The kids weren't afraid to get wet:

The rest of the park had some neat statues. This one had a plaque that said something about the father wearing a hankerchief over his head to protect him from the sun and that's exactly what my dad does too so he promptly put his own hankerchief on the statues head:

Day #10

The girls did a little more shopping at the markets while the guys took the kids to an amusement park where they rode bumper cars, shot guns, went on peddle boats and rode go-carts. That night after dinner we stopped by a French pastry shop called "C'est la Vie" and Ben bought us some yummy chocolates.
Nicholas and Spencer enjoyed riding to the top of our hotel in the this elevator (you can kind of see them up there):

Rachel is bargaining with a vendor for some tombstone rubbings:

Yep! We can all fit around my parent's coffee table for lunch of fruit and homemade bread egg salad sandwiches:

This picture is a little hard to see, but I tried to capture a guy pedaling his bike with this huge load on back:

My dad bought some traditional Chinese firecrackers that we let off on this last night and were just crazy! You'll have to wait for the video on that.

We had about a 15-minute walk back to our hotel each night from my parent's apartment. Nicholas and Spencer would say, "Just follow the 'moons' " (the street lights). Here they are holding the remains of my dad's firecrackers he bought and we had just let off: