Rainy Day in Xi'An

Today I crossed a couple of the tourist attractions off of my Xi'An list - I visited the Shaanxi History Museum and the Great Goose Pagoda.  It was about an hour walk to the museum, and as it was raining today I had to stop to buy an umbrella.

I asked how much and the lady said "er shi wu kuai."  I handed over 15 kuai and she looked at the money and said "er shi wu!  er shi wu!"  Oh!  25 not 15 :-S  Sheesh how long has it been since I've learned to count.

I also saw the Shaanxi Public Library on my way:

The museum was pretty much as you would expect (except free to get in!) - lots of pottery and artifacts, and all the descriptions were in Chinese!  So I forked out a few bucks for a guide, which was well worth the expense!  A couple of things worth mentioning - China has had exactly one female emperor in its history - Wu Zitian - who ruled from 684-705:

And I found out that pretty much every emperor or figure of any note whatsoever had their own terracotta army.  Here is one example:

These figures are each about a foot high.  The difference between most terracotta armies and THE terracotta army is the sheer size and amount of detail put into its construction.  THE terracotta soldiers are life size and the features and clothing are life-like, and the army numbers over 6000 soldiers, animals etc.  THE terracotta army, and the rest of the mausoleum, took 37 years to construct and required over 700,000 labourers.  And it is believed that this level of excess contributed to the short reign of the Qin dynasty.  There's a lesson to be learned there, folks!

I was in the vicinity so I dropped by the Great Goose Pagoda for a visit:

You pay once to get into the grounds and then a second time to actually go up the pagoda???  Sheesh another example of something that is borderline scam.  Especially since the 2 tickets together come to 80RMB, more expensive even than the Forbidden City or Summer Palace in Beijing.

On the way home I saw my first Chinese Walmart:

It was puny compared to the other stores in the mall.  It didn't even rate a mention on the map, it was just limed in with "Store area 2" or something like that.  The Wanda Dept Store was at least 10 times bigger, and this is supposed to be a Walmart "Supercenter".

Finally here is some food:

I had meat skewers for dinner in the Muslim District, but I didn't get any pics because it was pouring rain.  And yes I forgot to bring my new umbrella when I went out for dinner!

Finally, regarding money (a couple of folks have asked):  It's easy to exchange money in China.  There are banks all over the place.  The best rate is available by exchanging cash (you just need your passport) and most excruciatingly painful is travellers cheques (you need your passport, plus you need to sign until they're happy with your signature, plus they need to call over every manager in the branch to scrutinize every single cheque).  Travellers cheques give the same rate as cash, but you need to pay a small commission.  The most convenient is by ATM (if you can find one with works - so far I've only tried Bank of China and only in Beijing) but you get a poor exchange rate plus you get hit with a service charge on both ends of the transaction!  Most places take only cash, or other weird Asian electronic payment methods (which I have no intention to try to figure out).