Recently, I developed very ugly
enemy, which is jet-lag. I thought I was so exhausted and would sleep long, but
that did not happened because of jet-lag. I woke up at 4:00am and couldn’t be
able to go back to sleep. The breakfast of the hotel is really nice, verity of
choices. After breakfast I went out to have sightseeing tour with my colleagues
from MIT and BC. We took metro train to Dram and Bell towers, which is at the
center of the city. The two towers were built in 1034 A.D., and the big drams
and Bells that are located at the corresponding towers were used to tell the
time. In the figure below I just pretended to hit the drum, but actually it is
not allowed to hit it. For some reason, I become celebrity at the Bell tower,
and Chinese wants to take picture with me. Humm! That tells a lot; there is no
black community in Xi’an, which was confirmed by one of my Chinese colleague
from MIT. We then went for lunch at the nearby restaurants to explore the local
food. We heard Xi’an is known with spicy noodles, and we all ordered spicy
noodles.
Metro station in Xi'an!
Chinese flag with flowers, and bell tower at the back
One of the biggest dram at the dram tower
View from dram tower in which bell tower on the other end!
Became celebrity all of a sudden!
View from Bell tower with dram tower on the other end
The big bell located at the bell tower!
My lunch, spicy noodles
What do you think is this? if you say it is spaghetti, you are wrong. It is candy!
After lunch we took a walk
through the “snack street”. Holley molly! You can find all sort of food on this
street, which is actually very crowded, different type of food but you need to
watch out the ingredient. Next stop is the Big Wild Goose Pagoda, which is
a Buddhist temple located in southern Xi'an that was built in 652. Again we
took metro to go there. BTW, the metro system is so fancy and western like
system. The temple is more or less has identical building style and icons with
those temples that I saw in India, South Korea, and Thailand. The surrounding
area is so nice and attractive and worthy to look at it. At the end of our
visit at the temple, we decided to take taxi back to our hotel, but it was very
hard to find taxi on the street. We spent more than half an hour to get taxi.
My free time day has been concluded by having dinner at the conference
icebreaker party. Tomorrow the conference, which brought me here, will kick
off, and I’ve one oral talk (on Tuesday) and one poster (tomorrow) to share at
this meeting.
The big Goose entry gate!
The Big Wild Goose Pagoda (temple)
Imprinted icons inside the temple!
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