Today the smog has lifted! We have blue skies ad sunshine. We were planning to leave Xi’an today but because of the holiday Jackie had only able to get hard sleeper tickets (six berths sharing). Not what we wanted, so after some discussion and repeatedly stressing that we want only soft sleeper (four berth sharing) tickets, we are expecting Jackie to change them and hopefully get us the right class of tickets for departure tomorrow. Today we had an easy day, we wandered around the market in the streets by the South Gate of the city walls and then hired a tandem bike and cycled round the top of the walls. A very pleasant and relaxing day!
One of the more bizarre things we have seen whilst shopping here are live mannequins either sitting in shop windows as part of a display or actually on the street outside the shop. It must be something of a novelty here because it is still drawing crowds. One mannequin even waved at us!
One English word that all Chinese seem to know is ‘hello’ and everywhere we go we get children in particular calling out ‘hello’. And Andy’s beard attracts a lot of attention. So much so that people think nothing of openly staring at us in the street and in restaurants, to the extent of turning round in their chairs and just looking! They take photographs of us too! We’ve even had people ask to have their photo taken with us. Now we know what it feels like to be a minor celebrity!