So we spent our first day in Xining. We didn’t really see much today, our tour of the sites around here starts tomorrow. We just went and checked out the city, we saw a temple but we didn’t go in it as we will be going to several temples over the next several days. So we just took a bus downtown and walked around a bit.
This is the temple we saw, I can’t remember the name, maybe Ziqin will fill that in later :)
We did see The Edge of Tomorrow at a movie theater, it was okay, not great. Xining is a city much like the rest of China, constantly under construction. There are skyscrapers everywhere, new, old, and in the works. The city is at 7,464 ft elevation so we are still getting used to that still. Every time we get to the top of a staircase we feel a bit out of breath! It may not seem so high, but considering we live in Beijing which is at 142 feet elevation, it is a big change for us.
Xining is a small city by Chinese standards, only a bit over two million residents. It is the biggest city on the Tibetan Plateau though. There is a large Muslim population here, as well as many Buddhists. We in fact saw some monks walking around town today while we were wandering around.
Market we walked through
After the movie we went to have dinner, and believe it or not but Ziqin recommended going to Pizza Hut! So we did, and I discovered that Pizza Hut in China is a little different. Here you can get shrimp salad, a plethora of desserts, steak, and Chinese food! We stuck with salads and pizza, but I think we might have to try steak at a Pizza Hut one of these days…it is the cheapest steak I’ve seen in Beijing, and as I haven’t had a steak since I got here it might be worth a try 
Anyway, I didn’t stick to my promise, this post is not more interesting than the last, but tomorrow’s should be, tomorrow we will be making our way to some temples up in the mountains and seeing Qinghai Lake.
no idea what this is, but we saw it in Xining