Xi'an, it's all about the terracotta

Sorry it has been awhile, but we have been really busy in China and blogposting time is sparse. Quite a few weekends ago we went on a trip to a city just south of Beijing, Xi'an. This city is most well known for housing the Terracotta Warriors. Truly a wonder of the world, this recently excavated site houses over 6,000 life size clay warriors guarding the tomb of the emperor Qin Shihuang.

After doing some site seeing in Xi'an, we did not have a hard time finding nourishment in the large variety of local cuisine ranging from sweet to sour, savory, meat filled, to drinks of different flavors and consistencies. One of the first things I had to try here was the cotton candy. These larger than life swabs of white stringy goodness were prepared from actual sugar cane. To add to the eating experience, when you pulled off a string, a significant amount of stray sparkles lined your clothing. While enjoying my cotton candy, we passed a storefront bakery that was attracting quite the crowd. My friends and I indulged in the scrumptious almond cookies and these little pumpkin flavored balls with sweet bean paste in the middle. The best desert at the bakery was the delicate peanut brittle.

When we went to the Forest of the Stone Steles, we tried a small cup of regional noodles from a street vendor. At first the pungent pickled taste was shocking, but after time the thin strings of noodles mixed with the spicy pickled sauce became quite addictive. Next to the noodle vendor was a woman making jian bing. This is the Chinese version of an egg crepe.

The perfect mixture of crepe, egg, pickled spices, and onion only improves with the somewhat inconspicuous addition of a flattened, ultra thin, deep-fried noodle. When this delicacy comes off the griddle it is undeniably my favorite snack in China. The jian bing that my friends and I shared in Xi’an was the best version of this dish I had ever had. The noodle stayed crispy until the very end, and the flavors were phenomenal.

Back on the snack street we managed to muster up a few more meat filled dishes. In relation to western food, these were equivalent to quesadillas and hamburgers. What the Chinese quesadilla lacked in cheese it made up for with leeks, beef, and spices. Deep fried to the point of perfection, though I would generally be disgusted by oil dripping down my hand, I finished the snack within a few meters walking distance. The Chinese hamburger was not one of my favorite street foods, but it was an interesting mixture of rice, beans, spicy spread, mutton and beef inside a steamed dough bun.


To wash the street food down, there were intermittent stops of drink stands. The common drinks consisted mainly of highly concentrated sugars and teas. The most interesting of the drinks were the dark plum juice, the local teas, and most unique, the juice of the sugar cane. I didn’t get to try any of the sugar cane juice, but the plum juice was very flavorful. Another great drink here was the milk bubble tea shop that was next door to our hotel.


The most favored local cuisine of Xi'an seemed to be this mutton soup that the customer helped prepare by ripping bread dough and adding it to the soup. Since mutton is not one of my favorite meats the soup didn't really tickle my fancy, but I recommend trying it for the experience. All in all, XI'an was great and the food made the experience that much better.