{"id":66,"date":"2010-06-14T09:55:32","date_gmt":"2010-06-14T14:55:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.scottbressler.com\/blog\/?p=66"},"modified":"2010-06-17T11:29:57","modified_gmt":"2010-06-17T16:29:57","slug":"30-hours-in-xian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.scottbressler.com\/blog\/2010\/06\/30-hours-in-xian\/","title":{"rendered":"30 hours in Xi&#8217;an"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\"><em>Update: Now with some more detail.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\"><strong><\/strong><\/span>When I finally made it to Xi&#8217;an (flight last night was canceled, stayed in airport hotel in Beijing, and then got here at 8am this morning), I quickly made my way around the sights.<\/p>\n<p>I visited the Terracotta Army (incredible, mostly in quantity), the Muslim Quarter (delicious food &#8211; Chinese &#8220;pizza&#8221; and zongzi), and biked around the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/City_wall_of_Xi'an\">City Wall<\/a> at sunset (13.7\u00a0km, or 8.5 mi, long). So much fun!\u00a0Off to Hangzhou tomorrow.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Highlights<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Being whisked past all the lines by the tour guide I hired to see the Terracotta Army. Well, really just cutting all the lines as her insistence. Pretty awesome. Definitely worth the $15 for the two-hour tour she tried to give in English.<\/li>\n<li>Making friends with the owner of a sidewalk stall of his wife&#8217;s artwork. He worked in government for 19 years only to be fired when he had his second daughter (<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/One-child_policy\">illegal here<\/a>). He wants to move to San Francisco, get a green card (feasible within 5 years, he said), and bring his family over to the US. He also said all the jade (popular in Xi&#8217;an) sold at the street stalls is crap imitation, mostly glass. No surprise there.<\/li>\n<li>Being asked by the manager of the steamed cold noodle place (also popular in Xi&#8217;an) to translate some of the items on the menu to English<\/li>\n<li>Continuing my tradition of pretending to be a wedding photographer when I saw a shoot going down on the City Wall. The tradition started at least in Luxor, Egypt, if not before. Off the bike I went to snap away. For a short while, only.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Update: Now with some more detail. When I finally made it to Xi&#8217;an (flight last night was canceled, stayed in airport hotel in Beijing, and then got here at 8am this morning), I quickly made my way around the sights. I visited the Terracotta Army (incredible, mostly in quantity), the Muslim Quarter (delicious food &#8211; [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6],"tags":[11],"class_list":["post-66","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-travel","tag-china"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p26wXL-14","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottbressler.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottbressler.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottbressler.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottbressler.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottbressler.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottbressler.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":140,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottbressler.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66\/revisions\/140"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottbressler.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottbressler.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottbressler.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}