Day 5 (14 October 2014) in Xi'an, China

I’ve been at the conference all day. After the dinner, my colleague from NOAA and I decided to walk and explore Xi’an on the night side. We walked all the way to the Bell tower. It is about 45min walk from our hotel, however, do not ask me the traffic condition. When we walked via a small but crowded street (both with cars and pedestrians), it reminded me the famous Merkato (the biggest open market in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia). Finally, we ended up at one of the busy but noisy street, which is called bar street. Bar street is a few blocks away from Bell tower. There are different kinds of bars, some of them with live music, and we jumped into one of these bars and have a few bottles of beers. We then start walking back to our hotel, but decided to make one more test of Xi’an, i.e., to take electric ‘Tuk-Tuk’ in which Ethiopians calls it ‘Bajaj’. That was fun in deed.

Fuzzy pics of bar street!

Day 4 (13 October 2014) in Xi'an, China

The jet-lag did not get that better at all. Anyway, today I do not have that much to report because I was stacked at the meeting hall throughout the day.

Day 3 (12 October 2014) in Xi'an, China

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!

Day 2 (11 October 2014) in Xi'an, China

After 14 and half hours flight, going through the northern pole and crossed down to China over the eastern part of Russia, we safely landed at the economic heart China, Shanghai. Although Pudong airport in Shanghai is so big, my colleague Dave Webb and myself found our connection domestic flight check-in place very easily; of course after we passed through the security which is not that hard at all. Since we had enough time, we went to one of the restaurants close to our gate. I had beer, which is not that cheap actually. We boarded our flight on time and arrived in Xi’an as per our schedule and took a taxi to our hotel which is really very far. The room at the hotel is very fancy. I’m so exhausted and want to crash to my bed, and hope I’ll have something to report by tomorrow.  Good night!

 Pudong airport in Shanghai

 Xi'an from my hotel room!

Day 1 (10 October 2014) in Xi'an, China

Woke up early to catch my flight all the way to Xi’an, China via Newark, NJ. Boarded into the plane on time, start taxing to the driveway, so far no problem. At the middle of taxing, announcement from the pilot came through, saying they just found out the malfunction of temperature balancing system. A little while later, he came back again and said that he got confirmation from the service crew that we are ok to go ahead and take off. That sounds good, right? Then just wait, wait, and wait at the middle of drive way, the plane does not move. We spent more than half an hour. The time is ticking and I got scared, fearing that I might miss my connection flight. Then the pilot came back with different story and said we have to go back to the gate so that the ground crew will look at the problem. After spending almost an hour on the middle of the drive way, we went back to the gate. The crew came and looked at it and approved to go ahead. Now I’ve only one hour to catch my connection flight in Newark. Just to make the long story short, when we arrived at the gate in Newark, I only had 5min to catch the connection flight. However, since there were more than ten passengers, who had the same connection flight as mine, my connection flight crew had been informed about the delay. Guess what? We made it safely.