Xi'An, China

Our next stop after Beijing was Xi'An - one of the oldest cities in China. Xi'An is one of the four great ancient capitals of China because it was the capital during some of the most famous dynasties in Chinese history. Xi'An has more than 3,100 years of history and is the eastern terminus of the ancient Silk Road. We came here to see the Terracotta Soldiers :)

HOLY TRAFFIC! I have NEVER seen traffic jams to this extent. God bless our driver. He had to try 4-5 different routes before he could get us to the Terracotta Factory. We ended up on some serious back roads through shanty towns to get where we needed to go.

This is our guide - she got out to stop on-coming traffic so we could make a u-turn:

We hadn't eaten since we flew out at O-dark thirty so our guide gave us a Moon Cake. Moon Cake day was officially on the 3rd of October, but we were really hungry! Moon Cakes are traditionally eaten during the Zhongqiu Festival (the festival is for lunar worship and moon watching).

This is me with the Moon Cake:

Moon Cakes have extremely thick filling ... nothing like the Western-type desserts:

Not my favorite dessert. At least this one didn't have a salted duck egg in it like the ones the airlines gave to us. That was not a tasty treat ...

So since we had to go through the back roads, we were able to see one of the main crops - CORN! There were corn husks everywhere and the farmers had the kernels laid out on the road like this:

It really wasn't a very well developed area that we had to go through:

... hence the tractor coming down the free-way. See all of the umbrellas? They are ALL selling pomegranates. I like pomegranates ... and these were HUGE pomegranates ... but its a lot of work for very little fruit.