Internet cafes save my life

we had to postpone our trip to see the terra cotta warriors this afternoon on account of 1/3 of our group being sick sick sick. i'm thinking if 5 people are sick now, chances are the rest of us will be getting sick in the near future... but knock on wood that i'm still feeling fine. i find it a little uncanny that i haven't even had la duzi for a month or so now. mad props to my immune system, and i hope i'm not jinxing myself by typing this now. (unrelatedly, my shift key is sticky so i apologize for the lack of capitalization).

if you are following along, you will know that i am currently reporting from xi'an, the former central capital of china during several important decades. today it's most famously known for the terra cotta warriors i mentioned up there ^ and so far it's really cool. the xi'aners, unlike the beijingers, recognize the importance of a good city wall, so theirs is still intact and completely surrounds the center of the city. this morning we took a bike ride around it, for 13 km! it was pretty intense, though not really, but definitely a good work out. this afternoon i hope to visit the muslim market and buy some cool souveniers.

xi'an also has some really interesting food. all the street food looks good and some of it we've never seen before. last night's dinner was a real experience: we wandered out of our hotel and into this restuarant where everyone appeared to be eating some kind of soup. so we sit down and ask the waiters for a menu and then they repeat, really loudly "CAI DAN?????" so that the whole restuarant goes silent and stares at us. as if they weren't staring already. oops. but anyway, the caidan is posted on the wall behind the register in the front of the restuarant, and you're supposed to just go up there and order. this is what we did, not really having any idea what we were getting except that it was some kind of soup. an old man stopped me on my way back to the table and pointed at his soup telling me it was very tasty (in chinese). so i had high expectations, you see.

turns out we got the "common" soup, which had tofu, mushrooms, quail eggs, and noodles. but what made it really interesting was that eat soup came with a small piece of flat bread, kinda like a pita, and before they poured the soup you're supposed to break the bread into small pieces and then they pour the soup over it. realllllly strange but it tasted good. and i had never seen anything like it. i still don't know who's food it is (some kind of minority group maybe?) but the whole thing was quite an experience.