The City Wall, Bell Tower, and Drum Tower, again.

Today Xian University took us to the City Wall area.  Many of the students have been there; I have been there twice already.  We did not have a big turn out, 11 students.  I got to ride a bike on the wall again, which is always something I enjoy doing.  Because I have been there three times now I got to see the changes that occur.  When I was there the first time the wall had the floats from the New Years celebration up and still lit them at night.  The next weekend they were taking them all down.  This week I noticed that the decorative Kale that had gotten frozen before, had been replaced with the pansies and the petunias.  So there is always something new to see.  If I had remembered to put my memory card in my camera I would have had a picture of a guy welding in a business suit.  Tina, our guide person, had never ridden a bike on the City Wall and had only been there once before, when she was in grade school.  She does not really like the City Wall area, too many tourists.  It amazing how you can live somewhere and many times never do the things that are in your city.  I had never  been to many of the festivals in Peoria until I started sharing that with Nico, when he lived with us.

The City Wall area looks like this and is in the area of town where the hotels are and where the tourists stay.  Full of shops, restaurants, and western style things.  Like the Starbucks and the McDonalds.  I did get a big coffee and I did enjoy it.  It was so much better than the instant Nescafe.  Coffee is the one thing I really do miss, coffee,  and my sweet wife, JoAnne.  The next picture is of the very good dumpling restaurant.  The dumplings, or Jiao Zi, are very good but you can get good dumplings a block from campus and they are half the price.

This is just an area where you can walk around, eat and shop for knick knacks.  We did go to the shows at the Bell Tower and the Drum Tower.   The show at the Drum Tower is hard to watch and not think about the Surfaris hit song "Wipe Out."   Everything time they start play something that same "Wipe Out" melody comes in to my head.    The sun was out, the day was really the first nice day in a week and I loved it.