Goodbye Xi'an!

Iona

The Sisterhood had a later start to their day but checked out of the hotel in Xi’an at 10:30 am and left Huiming Jie, which is the Muslim region of the city. Here, we saw most of the women wearing hijabs and learned that they tend to speak Mandarin, their local language, and sometimes Arabic. Lining the street were many food vendors selling tofu, soup, meat, and fried foods; there was this one instance we saw where saw a lady purchasing some soup and she was given the soup in a plastic bag- very interesting. The walk along Huiming Jie continued as we went into the Great Mosque of Xi’an where we noticed that Mecca was to the west of us, as opposed to the east of us in America. There were courtyards and stone archways, and also pavilions painted with vibrant green roofs that were reflective of the theme of peace in Islam. After further exploration, we went to a restaurant that served us beef, chicken, and vegetable soup dumplings which made for a very filling lunch. After the soup dumplings, we went shopping on the street across from the Muslim corner, which was East St.

On East St, Nancy led us to an underground market where there were copious stores that sold various kinds of clothing- even shirts and hoodies that had poorly constructed English sentences on them... after laughing over many well-intentioned shirts, Liz brought up the idea to each buy one another a random shirt which we found hilarious. We set the budget to 100-150 rmb and then we were off! Liz was the first to find a white oversized hoodie with random pieces of black fabric on the sleeves that said “33 1/3 rpm opening ceremony” and on the back says “ARCHIVE” with “masculine feminine” at the very bottom. The sweatshirt was absolutely ridiculous and made zero sense and thus was the perfect gift for Kelbs. I haggled hard for a hoodie that was a light grey colour with four cats across the chest, very fitting for Liz I thought :). Kelbs had been looking at tshirts and settled on a white one for me that said “makes” above a picture of a girl wearing a shirt that said “THE FUTURE IS FEMALE” and on the back says “VERY BIG MIND”. I now have a shirt of a kid wearing a shirt and then a few random phrases of English... thanks Kelbs... We all exchanged clothing as we had shopped separately and were sent into fits of laughter as we saw the randomness of each of the shirts.