Xian Day 1!

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Hello everybody! Our holiday from our holiday starts today - well last night actually, but that was just sitting on a train from Beijing so that doesn’t really count. We got a nice train out though - we got a soft sleeper and they’re actually comfortable and clean - a nice break from reality! We had three of us too, Lloyd had to work, so we had the whole room to ourselves. The bottom bunk is a kind of lounge to sit on, so we sat up for a while having a chat and then just went to sleep and woke up in Xi’an.

We booked a hotel here that is part of a chain that we stayed with in Bordeaux - they were really clean and friendly and cheap, so we tried them out here. The website said that it was about 10 minutes from the railway station, but when we got there, the lady said that if we caught a cab it would take at least 30 minutes. We were very depressed. But when we arrived there, it was only 10 minutes, and best of all, only cost RMB10 by cab, so it’s actually in an awesome position. The drum and bell towers are a short walk away and lots of other stuff are just around the corner.

First thing after we got settled was to find how to get to the Terracotta Warriors. The train we were on was an overnighter, so we got in at about 8:00 in the morning, and after settling in it was still pretty early, so we had a good amount of time to get out there. The busses there and back were really comfortable and, best of all, something weird happened both going there and coming back! On the way there we saw a real life scam! Very exciting. There was a traffic jam on this quiet little back road in the countryside (The Warriors are about 45 minutes outside of Xi’an. They were discovered by farmers, so the land is basically just farmland with a few factories), and when we finally got to the problem, it was a bus that had just stopped almost in the middle of the road. After the bus driver had yelled at them for a bit we got around them and there was a little old lady lying on the road - it looked like she’d been hit until you really thought about it. If she’d been hit, I think she would have found it pretty difficult to hold up a cup asking for money. And what an amazing coincidence that the bus that hit her was one carrying western tourists!!! Maybe I’m just cynical. On the way back we waited for a while for the bus to actually leave, and then, when it finally did, we got around the corner and he stopped and got out of the bus. I though maybe there was something wrong with the bus, but when I looked out the window, I saw the drivers’ blue shirt and realized he’d just run off into the bushes to have a pee. I have no idea why he couldn’t have done it while we were waiting to leave.

Anyway, back to the warriors…We eventually arrived there, and went through the rigmarole of buying tickets from one place and then having to walk 3 million miles to find the actual entrance - I don’t know why they don’t just put the ticket office next to the gates - it’s crazy. I have no idea what to write about the warriors - aside from my usual “Oh, they were amazing, they were wonderful”. In fact, they were amazing, they were wonderful. They were, actually, every superlative under the sun, but I don’t think I can write well enough to convey that! Maybe just a boring rundown of what we did - we’re all just here for the pictures anyway aren’t we!?

We started at pit one, it seemed like a likely place. The pits are named (rather unimaginatively) after the order they were discovered in. There are three pits in various levels of excavation. Pit one seems to be the most excavated, but the area in the building itself is probably second in size to Pit Two. I have to be honest, I’m not entirely sure about a few things. I’m not sure whether the warriors that stand at the front of the room in a line were discovered intact, or if they have been put back together. I could easily do some research and find out, but I like thinking they were intact when they were uncovered, and research is likely to dash that dream. Besides, in some of the sites where the excavation was ongoing, there were a few places where there were very nearly intact warriors coming out, so maybe these ones were just really lucky. I don’t know. They’re fantastic though - so interesting, and so impressive, even though such a tiny fraction of them are actually visible. You probably know that they were all made with individual faces, although I think I read there were only a few patterns for the body that were mass produced. There were also chariots but they have since rotted since they were made of timber, but you can see where they were because their wheels left marks in the dirt when they dug them up. There were horses too. They were really cool.

The way they were set up was to have about 6 lines of troops, separated by wooden supports, and then a thick wall made of compressed earth, and on the other side of that another lot of troops set up in the same way. The wooden supports and the packed earth were the supports for heavy beams that ran across the top and they were covered in mats and the mats were covered in dirt so that they were all underground when they were finished. Unfortunately the beams have collapsed over time, so most of them have been destroyed, but some have held up pretty well.

Pit 3 was next. It was much, much smaller, and unfortunately I can’t read Chinese so I’m not entirely sure of the importance of it - although it does seem to have been a very important room. There are English captions on most things but they don’t go into the same details as the Chinese ones. There were a couple of dodgy shops in this section that claimed to fulfill your dreams of living in the time of the warriors by taking a photo of you and then shoddily photoshopping you into another world. One of the shops just cut your face off the photo and stuck it onto the face of one of the warriors, and the other didn’t even do that, they just had some models of warriors and took the photo in front of that. Now, you would think that the photos they have out the front were the best examples of their skill. Honestly, the photos were terrible. They didn’t even change the colour of your face to match the colour of the warriors, so in the one that they superimpose your face onto the warriors, you can actually see the line they used to cut your face out, and the faces are WHITE AS. It’s so silly. People seem to be happy to pay a fortune for it though.

Pit 2 was a bit bigger than the other pits, and it seems that they’ve changed their minds about how to go about the excavation here and left a lot of it untouched. I think (emphasis on think) that they are trying to find a way to preserve the paint on the warriors, because they were all originally fully painted, but when they uncover them now the paint fragments and falls off as soon as the light hits it. So there’s an awful lot in this room that is just the indentations of the wooden beams that ran over the top, and a lot of them have collapsed, so they have their work cut out for them. Maybe it’s just too much like hard work, and all that stuff I just wrote about the paint is to make them sound better!

Anyway, we eventually left the warriors, and after the bus driver relieved himself, we made it back to Xian. We got changed quickly and headed out again to see the city. First stop was the Drum Tower, another incredible building in the middle of these cities. They actually have performances there every day, so we kept an eye on the time and went for a walk down the street behind it, which is the beginning of the Muslim Quarters. They have every sort of food for sale here, as well as little trinkets and other stuff that tourists (like me) love to buy. They have a lot of dried food as well which is so colourful it’s just a nice walk down the lane to see what’s for sale. We stopped in one of the restaurants to have dinner, which cost about 6 cents each, and then realized we were running ridiculously late so sprinted back to the drum tower to see the show. It was really, really awesome, but not really easy to describe, so if you want to I’ll show you the video if you come visit me one day!

I think that’s all we did today, we crammed a fair bit into the day, so things are a bit blurry, but that sounds about right! Tomorrow we’re off to the Wild Goose Pagoda, mostly because I like the name, but also, there’s an awesome pop culture reference in there that I’ll write about next time because I want to make sure I have my facts straight!!!

Hope everybody’s well, there’s no internet here so it may take a while before I can upload these blogs while we’re away…hopefully we’ll find something.

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