Our late arrival in Xi’an was met warmly by the helpful staff at the hostel and a guy playing guitar in the cafe on the first floor. Our room had a nice king size bed, but was unfortunately not the cleanest. After a coffee and a beer in the cafe, we requested new bedding and proceeded to change the sheets on our bed. (No, this is not the part like the Bellagio).
Tuesday morning brought an early 6am departure for a trip to see pandas at the Shaanxi Wild Animal Rescue and Breeding Center. This center rescues injured animals and also protects animals from extinction. Our tour guide was really good; he has been giving tours of the center for over four years, and has seen the animals come and go, and knew the pandas all by name. We saw two pandas in their indoor/outdoor living habitats, a four year old female YaYa and a similarly aged male Erla. Here are pictures of the two posing for us.
We also saw an older brown panda named Qizai, which means superstar. In addition to the pandas, the center houses golden monkeys, golden takin (meaning sheep-ox in Chinese), crested ibis, eagles, vultures, an owl, and small red pandas (whose name means small bear-cat in Chinese). This was a great tour, definitely more than we had expected.
After a nap, we walked out to the south gate of the Xi’an City Wall, built by the Ming Dynasty in the 14th century, where we rented bikes to bike around the top of the wall. We decided to go for the tandem (first time we’ve ever done it), and it was a blast! It was also definitely harder than expected, especially when Ryan is on the back seat. When I’m on the back, I could take pictures, re-arrange my backpack, basically do whatever, I would just help peddle. When Ryan was on the back, every time he pedaled it would totally throw off the balance, and I had to work hard to keep us not running into people.
We headed down to the Big Wild Goose Pagoda for dinner and the nightly water show. Craving some ‘normal’ food, Ryan walked into the KFC, but the menu was unrecognizable, so he wound up with Burger King instead. We had talked about the water show being like the Bellagio, totally kidding, but it was actually a whole lot like the Bellagio water show! The fountains turned different colors and swayed back and forth to the music. It was very funny.
How is the language barrier in China? Have you learned any Chinese phrases? Love the panda pics!
Fewer people speak English here…but signage in the metro / airport / trains have more comprehensive English comments available. All we know is neehow (hello) and xie xie (thank you). I’ve actually also known peejoe (beer) for a while thanks to Brian Lee, but have just been getting by with Tsingtao
So far it has not been too bad.
As for the Panda pics, we were definitely not following the Yellowstone national park standard of 300 ft (yards?) from any bear. At one point, YaYa stretched out a paw to me within about a foot. Crazy…
Haha, I did not realize Nicole was “peddling” on the back of the tandem bike. I wonder what she was peddling? Cheap pictures with American tourists? Some of the Oreo cookies we had in our snack bag?
Oops
. I guess Ryan pedals, while I peddle . . . hmm . . . how about bicycle rides by Ryan? It would be like the guys with the rickshaws, but only one passenger at a time, and the passenger would have to sit on the back of a tandem bike.