I woke up at 4:45 this morning in order to get ready to leave Beijing and head to Xi’an. We went to the train station and took a high speed train. As we were boarding the train, a man approached me and said “Hello, how are you?”. I thought this was odd, but I was polite and responded. He then asked me if I was from Pittsburgh (I have Pitt buttons on my backpack) and he said that he went to Pitt for undergrad and then had an assistantship there! This was such a cool “small world” moment!

The train ride was long and kind of boring. I tried sleeping, but the train was a little too warm to sleep comfortably. However, it was cool to see the different landscapes from the window, as we would pass various cities, mountains, and fields. When we arrived at the Xi’an train station, it was quite hot (34* C).

After arriving at our hotel and getting settled, we went to the Drum tower. From the top of the Drum tower, we could see the Bell tower opposite it, surrounded by beautiful flowers. We then went to dinner at a famous dumpling restaurant. They brought out dumplings after dumplings and they were just as cute as they were delicious! We had cheese dumplings, pork, squid, vegetable, walnut, spicy chicken, shrimp and many more types of dumplings (16 kinds total).

Following dinner, we walked through the Muslim Streets, which has tons of food, handicrafts, and tea. It was super crowded and hectic, but really cool. We used this time to get our footing, and we’ll go back tomorrow to shop and eat!