IMHO In My Humble Opinion

First, a note on internet connectivity. Every night that I have internet, I plan on updating this blog. Tomorrow, I fly to Chengdu, where I don't know if I'll have internet access. After two nights in Chengdu, I'll be up at Emei Shan for two nights, and there's definitely no internet access there. After that another night in Chengdu (possible internet, we'll know tomorrow), before flying of to Tibet until the 29th when I'll get back to Beijing. According to the hotel website, I'll have internet access there, so the radio silence should only be a few days long. Now that we've got that out of the way...

This morning our first stop was the Wild Goose Pagoda, an old Buddhist temple. There were some beautiful gardens on the grounds of the pagoda:
Buddha Amid Lotus

I would have liked to have spent more time there rather than going to our next stop, the Shaanxi Provincial Museum. Sometimes I'm in the mood to look at cultural relics in glass display cases, but today wasn't one of those times (it didn't help that the interpretive placards often didn't have English, unlike just about every other place we've gone). I relaxed on a bench on the museum grounds, enjoying a nice view of the museum's architecture and the Chinese national bird, the construction crane:
Cranes Over Shaanxi

After lunch, we went to the Bell Tower in the middle of town, followed by a trip to the city wall (the last such complete wall remaining in China.) A couple of hours' rest in the hotel was followed by an amazing dumpling dinner (16 kinds of dumplings, most of them shaped to look similar to their stuffings, and the fish dumpling looked just like a koi.)

Following that, a few of us peeled away from the main group to explore near the city wall at night, because I really wanted to get some photos of the wall at night:
Xian City Wall at Night

This did involve basically walking through a park in the dark at night, which I suppose is something that we might have reasonably been worried about, but the people we encountered were either friendly, curious, or mystified at our behavior (especially when experimenting with the exercise equipment or when setting my camera up with both a timer and a long exposure time.)

All that said, it was a really fun excursion out on the town, and we managed it without even getting close to getting lost. (Which admittedly might make a better story.) One last night on the firmest bed I've ever slept on (it's almost, but not quite, like sleeping on a wooden platform with sheets)...