At the start of the eight day of the study tour, we were still in the train to Xi’an, in which most of us slept quite well after being cradled to sleep by the movement of the train. For me, this was quite familiar, since I traveled to China by train through Russia and Mongolia. Luckily, the beds in this train were somewhat softer than the one I slept on in a previous Chinese train. Our carriage woke up somewhat earlier than planned, since one of us found it necessary to curse us by ordering coffee for the next morning, which was already delivered ninety minutes before the train arrived. However, we will probably have to forgive Guido, since he has had some experience with a cursed roommate of his own.
After the train arrived, we walked to our hotel. We were quite delighted to see that our hotel was already visible from the train station, since most of our feet were still sore from hiking to the Great Wall of China.
Check-in was at two, so we had a free morning. My group used this spare time to go shopping for some nice tea, which we found in a very tiny store, with the owner sleeping on his couch. Unfortunately, the very special tea that Camilla wanted to buy was of low quality in summer, so we were offered some other samples and bought some of those. I am not sure what the others did this morning, but I believe some of them enjoyed themselves buying various tropical fruits, or fighting each other in gigantic plastic robots they found in some park.
After checking into our hotel and testing our beds, which were at least three times as wide as the ones in the train. I enjoyed a quick bath, and we went on to cycle over the city walls of Xi’an. Since riding a bicycle is quite common to us (we’re from the Netherlands, after all), we decided to go for tandems. This turned out to be quite scary, since we still cycled at our regular speed, or even faster. However, everyone survived, and even Wei got of the bike with only a single bruise, after Robin mistook a staircase for a ramp and steered their bike over it.
Since most of us wanted to prove to every Chinese on the walls that we can bike faster than them, we were quite tired, so we took taxis back to the hotel, and prepared for the cantus. The cantus, which is an event of guided singing, drinking beer, and storytelling, was quite nice, since three of our favorite professors and our beloved building manager were present in Xi’an. After drinking the entire beer supply of the hotel, which appears to be around thirty cans in a Chinese hotel, the hotel staff was nice enough to replenish their supply by going to a local supermarket. We had a nice time, reminiscing on what happened during the first week of our study tour, and went to sleep on our fluffy beds shortly after.
