After having breakfast, we packed up our luggage and checked out, and we asked the hostel to look after our suitcases while we are doing a little bit more of sightseeing before we have to catch our train to Shanghai. First, we went to see the Great Goose Pagoda, which we only looked at from the outside briefly.

There is a huge fountain going down the hill in front of the pagoda, where we could see the most comical thing happening. According to our experience, Chinese tourists take warning signs only as a suggestion, and still go to places and touch things that they are not clearly not supposed to. The fountain wasn’t full of water, so between the water shooting up, every other part of the fountain was pretty much dry, and all the Chinese tourists decided to go into the fountain and take pictures from there, or just cross the fountain to get to the other side, although sever signs said clearly no to. This meant, that about police officers were constantly running up and down trying to get people out of the fountain, but as soon as they managed to get some people out, other people went on the fountain behind their back. People also waited until the last minute to run off from the fountain before the police officers got to them, until then they quickly finished their picture taking and what not. This non-stop continued, it was hilarious to watch.

After having a good laugh, we took to Xi’an Great Mosque. The mosque dates back to 742 AD. According to the carving in the stones of the mosque, it was built during the Tang Dynasty, so it is now around 1300 years old. The mosque covers a total area of 13,000 square meters, and it was built in the shape of a rectangle. Its gardens are beautiful, and it is very very peaceful. We luckily managed to finish our walk in the mosque before all the other tourists arrived. Then we headed back to the hostel to pick up our luggage, and went to the train station to catch our train.

The train station in Xi’an is way more organized than in Beijing, so it didn’t take us much time to get through security and find our gate to the train. Now we are sitting on the train towards Shanghai, 4.5 hours down, 2 hours to go until we arrive (6.5 hours total).

Love,
Eszti & Simon