Click on images below to enlarge:
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| Major Mausoleum of Terracotta Warriors, Mausoleum of the First Qin Emperor
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| In the main mausoleum, a phalanx of terracotta warriors.
Excellent. View the full-sized image and appreciate how every
face is very detailed and yet unlike every other. (Like many other
pictures in this set, this picture is at my camera's highest
resolution.)
| Three long rows of warriors. Though not as good as the previous photo,
I'm nevertheless marking it as excellent.
| Truly excellent. Another very high resolution photo of the
terracotta warriors in the main mausoleum. Imagine how it would look if
the paint on the warriors hadn't faded to non-existence.
| Excellent. This photo attempts to capture the wide breadth of
the mausoleum and the sheer number of warriors.
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| Unsatisfied with the previous photo, I took this excellent
panoramic movie of the mausoleum. It's an aircraft-hangar-like space.
| Many different faces / personalities. Excellent.
| Ditto, just a different row. Similarly excellent.
| Mountains surrounding the mausoleum.
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| Art Exhibition in Grand Mercure Hotel
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| I like this impressionist painting I found in the art gallery in the
basement of our hotel.
| The card attached to the painting. It's being sold for approximately
17,500 US dollars!
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| Dinner at Shaanxi Canton Place (?)
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| Green soybean jelly noodles. Oily. As I discovered over the course of
visiting Xi'an, I don't like jelly noodles. The texture is off-putting.
| Carrots and ...
| "Yams with flower sauce." The yams tasted cool, crisp, almost like
jicama.
| Asparagus with peanuts. Tasted fresh, clean. (Yes, I know there are no
peanuts in the picture. Nevertheless, what I wrote down was very
clear.)
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| Fried rice.
| Broccoli.
| Chinese hamburgers: buns with a hollow inside that we filled with the
minced meat. Good. The meat has some kick.
| One of the restaurant's specials: beef with something I don't recall.
Juicy, succulent, and quite good, this is the only dish we had that we
ordered and went through two plates of.
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| Sweet and sour pork. This also disappeared fast (but we only ordered
one plate).
| Greens.
| A salad. Looks like lily buds, cucumbers, and more.
| Good quality chow fun.
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| Another of the restaurant's specials: eggplant in a clay pot. It's like
what my friend Oj likes. Even the skin on the eggplant had been
removed (as he prefers).
| We also had mango folded in phyllo dough. A buttery dessert, it was gone before I got to take a picture.
We received watermelon too.
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| Tang Dynasty Show
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| The welcoming dance, "Greeting Ambassadors", with harps. My goodness
can those women bend.
| A movie (with sound) of (the finale of?) the opening dance.
| A sleeve dance, which made me think of overly-long pajama legs.
| A movie (with sound) of another sleeve dance.
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| The dark blue ending to "Monk Xuanzang" dance. The earlier part of the
dance, which used yellow lighting, evoked images of saffron-colored
monks struggling through the desert, reminding me much of paintings
I saw in Singapore.
| The "A Beautiful Dream" dance, my favorite from the show. It occurred
on two levels.
| A movie of a Chinese orchestra. Not your traditional Western orchestra.
I took this at a low resolution because I mainly wanted to record
the sound.
| Another movie. The guy in yellow, Gao Ming, is amazing! I love him and
am sad I only managed to record the tail end of his act. It's not only
that he played the bamboo flute, the pai xiao, well but also that he's
an excellent chirper. I wish I recorded more of his performance -- more
of his chirping. You hear it briefly five seconds into this clip and
longer thirty-five seconds in. His greatness is not simply that he was
obviously skilled; rather, he was clearly having fun with the audience.
The enjoyment he gets from performing was palpable.
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| The closing dance, with lanterns, the "Grand Dynasty" dance, perhaps.
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Note: I did not photograph all the dances.
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