Terracotta!

Woke up around 9 which was a good thing, as we planned to go with the couple we met on day 1 to Terracotta Warriors at 10.
I got downstairs at around 9:15 and had coffe with some girls and chatted about travels.

Once the 6 of us (4 girls, Stu, and Dan) were all ready, we headed out.
The Terracotta army was totally crazy and deemed the '8th wonder of the world'.
For those of you who don't know what they are, over 2000 years ago, an entire army of terracotta soldiers was built.
Apparently each of the soliders has a different design (there are literally thousands of them). They're not small either. They are life sized, and had weapons, charriots, the works.

They were discovered in the 70's by some guy trying to dig a well, and thank goodness they were! Archaeologists are still uncovering, and it is estimated to take another 200 years before all of them are unearthed.

After that we saw the 2 biggest marionettes in the world that were used in the Beijing Olympics (and created for them, too.) called 'The Warrior and the Girl' (or soldier and girl...)
anyway, they were totally rediculously awesome.

When we got home we were super hungry after not having lunch. It was about dinner time when we got back.

We walked around for-ev-er trying to find a restaurant that was good like the one on the first night, but it was evident that we had just lucked out.

We went back to the same restaurant as the previous night and tried (unsuccessfully) to order 'something different'. I just ate my egg fried rice and heaping cucumber salad (mm mm good!) as Stu picked away at the gruel we were served (what a martyr!).

That night was probably the most hilarious night ever once we got back to the hostel.

It started with a dumpling party. Totally fun! We learned how to shape perfect little dumplings! I thought we were going to make the innards and the dough, too, but I guess given the amount of people doing it and the limited amount of space, that may have been difficult.

Regardless it was a lot of fun and we met a lot of new people!

All in all hundreds of pork and egg/green onion dumplings were made.
They were DELICIOUS!

We met the worlds craziest Japanese guy (like, you have never met a guy this crazy in your life... SO EXCITED about EVERYTHING!)

We hung out with 2 guys from England and the crazy Japanese guy all night, which was great fun. I can't really describe the conversations had... but believe me, we were almost crying from laughing so much at the Japanese guy.

After that, Stu and I went on the net to try to do some serious planning.
We found killer flights out of Xi'an to Kunming that were about the same (maybe a little more) than the THIRTY SIX hour train ride we would've had to endure.
SO THANKFUL FOR THAT!

When we got upstairs we were still kind of wired and ended up watching a national geographic show about the Taliban. (and then I had a nightmare!)
We got to bed around 2ish.