East Street wandering

Today we went to East Street, that is the name of the street that runs east from the Bell Tower in downtown Xi'an. We went searching for a foreign language bookstore, but aparently we didnot wander far enough. It was bitter cold so we search in malls/dept stores as much as possible.
Below are a few pictures of the adventure:

 A lit up elephant for Zina...

 These 2 were taken from the same spot looking opposit directions. for you shoe lovers out there. 2 stores had floors like this.

 In the Kaiyuan Mall on the SE corner of the Bell Tower. 6 floors. Food court on the top. Mc Donalds in the basement.

On the side of a building taken from the bus on the way home.

New Years Day

For New Year's Day we went to a new Resturant that Rosie found in the XianEase magazine.
It is called Sculpting in Time. It is a chain cafe here in Xian. There is one next to the campus where we live. So we tried it out. The menu had english on each entry. There are steak, pizza and pasta entries along with chinese entries. We tried the pizza and fries seen in the pictures below:

 The Lady at the counter. She takes the orders from the servers and gives them to the cook and then the food from the cook and gives to the servers to deliver to the customers.

 We wanted a side order of fries and got 4 wings, small green salad (looks white in the picture, and a vegetables in vinegar salad. the blob at the top of the plate is ketchup. When they brought the pizza they took this plate away because there was not room for both on the table. So we didnot get all the food from that plate ate before it was cleared. we also had a piece of cake and ice cream we shared. IT came first then the fries then the pizza. We will go back and try the pasta and stake another time.

Hawaiian pizza. there was lots of cheese, pineapple and chinese ham.

XISU Foreign Teacher Social

On Dec 26, XISU hosted a social for all the foreign teachers at a fancy restaurant in a fancy hotel. They bussed us here and back. it was about a 30 minute bus ride. The President of the University spoke and Dan representing the teachers and then we had a buffet. The only problem with the buffet was the dessert. The yummy looking chocolate ice cream was disgusting! Four of us got it and four of us only took a small taste and ignored the rest.

 Main dish line, 10 different dishes.

 salad, soup, etc line. The yellow in the back was the desert bar. The only good thing was the chocolate fountain, with fairly decent chocolate (not like the icecream). They also had real good bread, unusual for Chinal.

 The lady teachers all wanted lots of pictures, so I took a few.

New Year's Eve With the Branch Members

We all met at the Big Wild Goose Pagoda at 6:00pm to see the water show. They have the largest fountain in Asia here. Finally someone figured out how to find out the time and we were told it would not be until 8:30pm so we went to a new 'Make your Day' resturant in the Star City Mall for dinner. Make Your Day serves american food. Unfortunatley they were very very slow and some did not start eating until almost 8:30 - 1:30 after we arrived there. We went back to watch the water show but there were so many people there we could not see it, only the top over peoples heads. These are pictures I took that night:

These first three pictures are of the ceiling in the Star City Mall court. it is a big TV screen about 20 meeters wide and 80 meeters long. No way to get a picture of the whole thing.

 This was Rosie's stuffed bell pepper at Make your day.

 The ceiling lights at Make Your Day

 Girls giggled at Rosie's fancy hat and had to have their picture taken with her

 Branch members eating o waiting for food. Service was the worse I have seen.

The Big Wild Goose Pagoda from the South at about 9:30pm

HanYangLing Mausoleum

XISU took the foreign teachers to this burial site. It is where the 4th Qin Dynasty emporer and with wife are burried.
We went there the 15th of December, 2012
Again, they donot load in proper order.

 Our guide, she spoke very good english

 The wife's tomb

 The emporer's tomb. Neither tomb has been opened only the sites around the wife's tomb.

 They were trying to tell us you have to work here to get in the digs.

 Model of the wife's tomb. the small lines around it is the digs we are observing.

 These are not life size like terra cotta warriors of the 1st emporer. They are about a meter tall.

 models of the carriages of the empress.

 Full size model

 example of the architecture. this is in the underground museum.

 Potter that has been excavated.

 The bow legs are for riding horses, see below

 emporess seal. so small you need a magnifying glass to see the detail.

His hands are missing because they were made of wood and did not last 2000 years.