Xi'an, China

Xi'an is a great city. Cliff did two training runs along the top of the city wall, which surrounds the inner part of the city for 14km. Liam and I hired bikes and followed slowly behind. It was really cold there, so the gloves, scarves and hats all came out of the bag. The paper lanterns that they'd used in the recent festival of light were being displayed on the top of the wall, Liam was particularly taken with the tiger ones. It's the year of the tiger and so was 1998, Liam's birth year. As a result, he believes that he should be on for an extra-special birthday present this year :)

On our second evening here, our laundry was delivered back to us with a bit of a shock attached, granted we had a lot - probably two loads, but he wanted to charge us 495 yuan for it - about £50! They had also repaired Cliff's jeans, but still that was outrageous. We had only gone with this guy because he was recommended by our guide (!) from the previous day, as she said he would do it for a third of the hotel's cost. After a bit of wrangling, we paid much less than he was asking, but still far more than we've paid before. Tip: get all your washing done in Cambodia - $1 a kilo!

We did struggle to find food here though. On the first night we went to the restaurant right next door to the hotel. We thought we'd point at a couple of dishes and we'd be on our way. Cliff thought he'd managed to order three plates of noodles at the counter, whilst I pointed at three dishes on a trolley that they brought to the table. The noodles never arrived (maybe they thought Cliff was just admiring them?) and the baby sweetcorn that I managed to get delivered to the table turned out to be squid! I didn't have my glasses on. So we were left with some dodgy looking mushrooms and some pickled cabbage. Yum. The bill itself was some kind of strange maths puzzle, where everything was in binary or base 2 (for you maths geeks out there) so if something cost 12 yuan, they ticked one on the 8 row and 1 on the four row. This added even more confusion, as the bill had made us think that we were waiting for three extra dishes (the elusive noodles) that never came. We finally got our heads around the bill, paid it and left in search of more food.

Here's one of the many dogs here whose owners don't prefer the natural look.

One of the department stores had a climbing wall (right next to a full sized basketball court) and Liam had a go. He's pretty good and has no fear.

On our last night we went to an Indian restuarant that Cliff had researched down by the Big Wild Goose Pagoda. A little cutie called Angou who was 4 years old, came over to introduce herself and she entertained us throughout our meal. She even gave Liam a present, a set of Doramon chopsticks. After our meal, we had a wander around the pagoda grounds and saw a man practicing his caligraphy using water on the pavement. I'm surprised it wasn't freezing on the ground, it was so cold. But we still headed over to Baskin-Robbins for ice cream. Then we went back to the hotel on the bus (5p each).