fh_trips | AM - Grand Park Xian Hotel, Xi'an

It's time to get up out of your rooms, everyone! Or order room service and hide from the sun. But we're judging you. Just sayin'.

[OOC: Roommates are the same as the last hotel, and the room numbers are MAGICALLY ALSO THE SAME. Room assignments are still here and NSFW still goes in personal journals!]

Summer shuffled back into her room after her radio broadcast, flopped face first on the bed, and let out a frustrated groan. Then she just stayed there for a very long moment before lifting her head and going to her phone with the intention of setting an alarm so she could grab maybe a little nap before the panda thing (stupid squirrels, it was definitely early enough), and then got thoroughly distracted with Facebook.

Jason wasn't a light sleeper, exactly, but between Summer leaving the room, coming back, and that frustrated groan, he was... more or less awake.

"Ugh," a pillow was being flung vaguely in your general direction, Summer. With no real force behind it, of course, but flung it was.

Summer...deserved that. She couldn't argue that much, though she did wince a little when the flung pillow struck, not from physical damage but for the damage to her pride.

"Sorry," she murmured, quietly, but it wasn't like it would matter anymore, the damage was done. "Stupid friggin' squirrels...no one is even up to listen to the thing anyway, so why does it friggin'..."

Realizing she was reduced to a rambling mutter, she just sort of trailed off.

And now Jason felt kind of bad for reacting the way he had. Oops.

"It's fine," he said after a moment. "I mean, this way I'll get to the buffet before anyone else, probably."

And now Summer felt bad about how she reacted. It now had layers, and layers meant awkwardness that she had hoped to generally avoid when sharing a room with Jason, but she should have known better.

"Truuuuue," she said slowly, glancing over. "Plus, you won't have to worry about missing the bus or anything. I hear there might be pandas."

Pandas made any situation better, right? Even your temporary roommate waking you us because very stubborn squirrels had woken her up.

"And pandas are pretty frickin' cute," Jason had to admit.

One of the many benefits of working to unlearn toxic masculinity? Being able to admit things were cute.

"Aren't they just??" Summer couldn't help gushing, the prospect of adorable things managing to give her a surge of natural energy, but the disgruntledness swept right back in pretty quickly. "A whole lot cuter than squirrels, at any rate......"

But it was done and over and no use being upset about it when there were cute things in her future. More cute things, her brain amended as she glanced back over toward Jason's bed.

"Err, are you thinking of going, too? To the animal place?"

"Ummm, hell yeah," Jason said, grinning back at summer.

And Summer had to laugh a little, relaxing a bit as she said, "Good. Because I would have had to re-evaluate a couple things about you if you said no."

A lovely buffet is available to you in the Veranda Cafe, with a wide variety of Western and Chinese breakfast options. And coffee and tea. So many kinds of coffee and tea.

Edited 2018-03-08 05:41 (UTC)

Paaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaandas. We've driven 70 kilometers out of town to see the 20 pandas at the Shaanxi Wild Animal Rescue and Breeding Center. Granted, pandas sleep about 20 hours a day, but you can't go to China and not try to see the pandas. The center is also home to red pandas, golden monkeys, black bears, leopards, giant salamanders, and crested ibises. Enjoy the tour of how the center works! Try to spot the pandas!

Pandas were cool, but after five minutes of trying to find something white, black and sleepy in the reeds, Dante was already regretting coming here.

"Shoulda gone for the noodles."

Aw, but the pandas were so cute! Sure, all the other animals were cute too, but pandas. They might be Peebee's favorite Earth creature so far.

. . . she was absolutely not scouting around the panda enclosure trying to figure out how she could steal one. Nope. Nooooooooooope.

“What are you looking for?” Rey asked.

“Oh, nothing,” Peebee said in an innocent tone of voice that didn’t sound innocent at all, especially since she happened to be inspecting the hinges on a gate. “Just, you know. Checking out the panda habitat.”

Which had nothing to do with the ‘what do pandas eat’ Google search she had up on her omni-tool.

Rey raised an eyebrow. “The habitat instead of the pandas?”

"Why can't I be interested in both?" Don't mind Peebee quickly closing that browser tab. Or the page on panda habitat requirements that was visible once she closed the first tab.

Rey frowned when she caught that. “Are you... thinking of raising pandas?”

"It's . . . academic curiosity," Peebee tried to insist. "Besides, look how cute they are!"

Uh huh.

“They are,” Rey allowed. “But.... how would you even do that?”

"No idea, but I bet I could figure it out," Peebee said with far more optimism than reason. "Never know until I try, right?"

Rey paused.

“I’m not condoning this but I want to see what you do,” she admitted.

Rey, no. Don't encourage her.

"Locked, of course," said Peebee, and she'd known it would be but had to try the latch anyway. "Probably alarmed, too, but let's see if I can't do anything about that."

She pulled up the hacking interface on her omni-tool (hey, at least now the incriminating panda related Google searches were hidden now) and started trying to scan the gate for an alarm system. Which was going to take a while for her older omni-tool to process. "Ugh, hurry up already."

Especially because having her entire left forearm basically wrapped in glowing orange light was pretty unsubtle, and the longer she stood there, well.

"What are you doing now?" Anakin demanded, coming from nowhere.

This was twice on this trip Rey was hearing that tone, and she held up her hands. Maybe out of innocence, maybe out of frustration.

“Nothing, I swear.”

Peebee shut off her omni-tool, though it was too late for that now.

"Just admiring the panda habitat, that's all. I have to appreciate this kind of dedication to animals, you know?"

Anakin didn't look like he was buying it.

He crossed his arms over his chest. "I'm not buying it."

See?

“She’s telling the truth,” Rey said.

Because there hadn’t really been an attempt to steal anything yet so from a certain point of view...

Steve was learning that pandas were a lot harder to see than a giant black and white bear should be.

Edited 2018-03-08 12:25 (UTC)

Mara wasn't about to miss the pandas. There were so fuzzy!

The pandas weren't a lie! Summer could forget about her irritation with radio as she cooed eagerly at the cute animals and tried to get pictures of them as best she could, which sometimes required a little creativity on her part, them being so sleepy and all.

She was definitely a little envious right now.

The pandas were pretty cool- Norman made a point to get a couple of photos of them to send back home to Courtney and Neil, after all. But he was here for the red pandas, himself. The smaller, clumsier, more raccoon-shaped members of the panda family.

Call him a sucker for the underdog. He was perfectly happy to sit and watch those while everyone else crowded around the giant pandas instead.

Rey was always a bit of a sucker for getting to see different kinds of animals, and look at the pandas! When she could see them!

And there were more animals to look at! While she wasn’t one fit outright squee, there was definitely internal squee happening.

Sidon had truly developed a love and fascination for the sheer diversity of animals on this planet, so he was just as stoked as he'd been about anything on this trip for the animal sanctuary, and all the wonderful new critters he'd get to see and find out about.

Everything had been so wonderful, true, but this was probably going to be his favorite.

Did you sleep in and miss the pandas? Try the walking tour! You'll pass the City Wall, the Bell Tower, the Drum Tower and back down into the Muslim Quarter before looping around to the Xi'an Museum (you have a ton of time to explore), the Small Wild Goose Pagoda, and the Shaanxi History Museum (because what's better than one museum? TWO MUSEUMS.).

Okay, buying jade is probably waaaay outside of most of our budgets (not talking to you, Tony Stark), but it never hurts to look, right?

Oh, man, this was a bad idea. Here Amaya was thinking she'd go to the factory and see them working with the jade from a purely professional perspective, to appreciate and maybe learn some different techniques, but, oh, how it just made her think of how she'd never really worked with jade and they made it look so easy, and maybe she was just desperate to work with anything but she could make such cool ceremonial daggers out of--

--nope. She had to stay strong. She dropped money on anything here, she'd be forfeiting her forge for at least another year. So she'd just stick to appreciating the work of other artisans and defiantly ignore the itching in her fingers.

Spices, food, t-shirts: this market has it all!

Did you come back to the noodle place? We're not judging, they're delicious. Xi'an also claims they have soup dumplings as good as the ones you'd find in Shanghai. (Don't tell Shanghai, they'll fight you.)

Ugh, work.

AM - Grand Park Xian Hotel, Xi'an

HOTEL: Grand Park Xian

Rooms

Room 3

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Breakfast

Excursions

Shaanxi Wild Animal Rescue and Breeding Center

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Walking Tour of Xi'an

Tian yi Jade factory

Re: Tian yi Jade factory

Muslim Market

Food

OOC