To Xian. 23May. Polytechnic University. Muslim Great Mosque. Lots of walking. Hot.

9:00am, depart for  the airport.   Fly to Xian, on China Eastern airlines, an Airbus 320 plane, which was fine (and better than American Airlines).  A 2 hour flight arriving about 1:45pm.  Air obviously polluted here as well (but slightly better than Beijing).  Meal of pork with rice, a roll with an unknown orange fibrous insert (no one could figure out what this was), with two "chips ahoy" style cookies for desert.

 Shudong presents us with lychee nuts for a treat.   Kind of like a cross between a plum, a persimmon and a kiwi.

After arrival at 1:45pm, we bus to Xian Northwestern Polytechnic University Zheng He Hotel guest lodging ( a modest hotel space, in the midst of the older central city campus).  JCCC has a sister relationship with this University.  A/C controls with only Chinese instructions (which turned out not to be uncommon).  Our youngest trip member, Aaron, will be lodging on this campus in the fall of 2013, as a scholarship student.

We didn't get to tour the campus, but signage made it clear that the University does aerospace research.
I understand there is a new campus in the "suburbs", which we did not visit.
The University Facebook page appears to focus on the new campus.  Interestingly enough, both Facebook and Twitter were blocked from internet access in China, so I could not have shown you (or looked at) this link while on the trip.

And there were some interesting "faces" in Xian (and other major cities)  You might spot KFC and McDonald's in this photo.  ...That's the back of our group generally in the center of this photo.

The Muslim Great Mosque was begun in 742CE, during the Tang dynasty.  It is located inside the Great Wall of Xian, which surrounds the old central city of Xian.  The wall is 39 feet high, and is 1.5 miles in length.   In 1956 the mosque was declared to be an important historical and cultural site.  Since China opened its borders in 1978, the mosque has had over 10 million visitors.  The mosque itself (a small part of the 13,000 square meter site) can hold over 1,000 worshippers.
For more info see this Travel China link, or this wikipedia site