This fresh, bright day was spent exploring the city within Xi'an's old city walls. We wandered towards where our hostel's handy map indicated there was a "Bird Market" and even though we never found that we found plenty to occupy us. In the morning and afternoon we found people sitting at card tables on the sidewalk playing Mahjong and Chinese chess.



We found a street full of food and restaurants, including a window I could peek through and see every bit of a chicken fried up and ready to eat.



See? Even greasy little chicken feet waiting to be eaten.

At one point we passed a fence and a sudden waft of foreign sounding music came to us. We peeked through the fence and were faced with an unexpected sea of brilliant, organic green.



We found our way around the fence, over a wall and were suddenly in a very pretty public park. We followed the sound of music to its source and discovered, well, several sources. There were at least three separate musical activities going on in the park. First we found a few musicians seated at strange few-stringed instruments which made very alien sounding melodies and squeaks. Then we ran into a flat, paved section of park where a small cluster of people were dancing ballroom. A Chinese man asked me to dance (I think, or at least urged me to dance) and I had to duck my head and claim that I didn't know how. Which is a true enough claim, I think. Finally we discovered a saxophone-heavy jazz band in yet another part of the park.



The people who were standing around weren't just listening, they were also singing along in Chinese to songs I didn't recognize, but were in a must more Western style than the other music we had encountered.

Towards the park entrance--the real one, which didn't involve climbing fences or walls--we found an adult playground full of ordinary gym equipment that was weatherized for the outdoors and covered in primary-colored plastics.



It's harder to tell in this picture, but there was StairMaster-esque equipment, and leg presses and stationary bikes and even some elliptical equipment!



We ate dinner at a hotpot restaurant next to the hostel. We tried the restaurant's special warm-yeast-beer before we decided to stick to nice cold Tsingtao. Dinner came to our table and was cooked on the hotplate set in the middle. The broth contained basically all that there is of a chicken except for the head and the feet. There were actually parts in there that appeared to be perfectly inedible, bone and gristle and what appeared to be... neck bits? I could find nice recognizable pieces of chicken, and there was cabbage and radish and noodle to eat, but every now and then I would fish up a long, white segment of... /something/. The Something had the exact texture of animal fat (I know, because I tried one before I knew better) but the pieces were too big to be chicken fat, and it had the wrong flavor for pork fat and even as the broth bubbled and boiled it didn't cook down or react like fat normally would. I swore off the mystery lipid after my one piece, and concentrated on the noodles and the hunt for recognizable chicken meat.

After exploring all day I was a bit hot and fried, so the idea of running through sprinklers definitely occurred and appealed to me. So, for our second visit to the Big Wild Goose Pagoda, Brennan and I came prepared.



By prepared I mean that we wore our bathing suits and money in a Ziploc bag. This time as soon as the music started people streamed into the fountain, mostly children and young people who dragged their protesting friends in after them. Brennan attempted to teach me a box step, but I'm pretty crap at dancing under the best circumstances, let alone when I'm dancing into cold jets of water every few steps. We did manage some theatrical spins and a pretty good shuffle step.

I need to take some dance lessons for when I travel abroad next time. I want to be able to accept a dance from a stranger in the future, whether it is in a public park or a fountain.