February Vacation Starts Today

Hey everyone,

Well this post is coming to you from Xi'an! It is the first stop of our tour. We took a hard sleeper train ride for about 20 hours to get here. In the hard sleeper you share a cabin of six beds. For a trip this long I think it was the best way to go. It was so comfortable, but the only worry was sharing with strangers. It all worked out for the best though so no worries.

Well Josh had sent out an email to ask the Hostel to pick us up at the train station, which they had previously offered. We got there and there was no one there to pick us up! We called them and asked them to tell the taxi where to go. We thought we were on our way there when we ended up at a Western International Hotel, which was not where we were supposed to be. The concierge knew of the hostel and told the taxi how to get there. To make matters worse when we finally got to the hostel it was closed for CONSTRUCTION!!! There was no indication of this when Josh booked so we were getting a bit set off. They sent us to their sister hostel. We were not the only ones bothered with the circling of Xi'an, the taxi driver gave the people at the first hostel a real piece of his mind and was grumbling the entire way to the other hostel.

We finally arrived at the Han Tang Inn International Youth Hostel, which is absolutely amazing!!! There are plenty of other foreigners here and the restaurant/bar/common room is very nice. We looked to find out what kind of hostel we ended up with and it turns out that this one is better than the one we had originally booked. We unloaded our bags and walked around the area. We are very happy to start off our tour here and are very anxiuos to see all that there is to see.

Tomorrow we are going to see the terracotta warriors.

On February 9th we head to Guilin for 5 days. Then to Shenzhen followed by Hong Kong where we'll be meeting my mom and brother (I am going to burst with excitement!). After Hong Kong we are all heading to Beijing. Then we will part ways and go back to work :(.