Xian

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19-24 October

After Chengdu we went by train to Xian, home of the famous terra cotta warriors. It was meant to be a short stop before going on to Beijing, but Dalila got sick again and we spent an extra three days until she got better. It turns out that her illness was a lot like my own - 2-3 days of feeling really bad and then 2-3 weeks of feeling well until the next round of illness hits. Only it seemed to be a little worse for Dalila. She not only saw every other doctor in Asia but also took many many different medicines based on the conflicting advice of the different doctors. Plus every lab report showed,as with me, that there was nothing wrong with her blood or anything else, which is really frustrating when you're feeling so bad to be told that there is nothing wrong with you. So we tried our own version of medicine/feel good treatment - corn ice cream. The Chinese will eat absolutely anything, but corn ice cream was a new thing for all of us. And it eventually did the trick because we finally got out to see the terra cotta warriors.

It is an amazing sight to see all those warriors lined up together, each one different in so many details. It is even more impressive and more than slightly odd to think of all the work, planning and thought that went in to the project. As many as 700,000 people worked on the terra cotta army over a period of 38 years, only to have all the work buried with the emperor and covered up immediately with no one permitted to ever view it. And many workers were buried alive along with their work. That the lives of so many could be affected for so long by the conceit of so few men is just absurd, yet such a beautiful and grandiose thing arises from that absurdity. It also left me wondering how something like this could ever be conceived. The terra cotta army was produced to help the emperor to rule another kingdom in the afterlife. Which means that at some point someone woke up one day and thought "You know, it would be a great idea to create a huge, a really huge fake army of clay soldiers and they could...oh I don't know...continue to help the emperor rule a magical sky kingdom". And then this idea gets the OK all up and down the line of advisors and politicians. And this was 2200 years ago. What could they do now with computers, plastics, and toys full of lead?

The soldiers and their horses were absolutely beautiful, though, and the amount of detail is staggering. The hair and facial hair styles, clothing details, weaponry, ethnicity - everything was incredibly reproduced and amazingly well preserved. And the modern Chinese tourists absolutely love the site - they were so happy and overwhelmed and proud to see this amazing part of their culture. All day the site was packed with tourists, mostly in slightly comical groups with cheap matching baseball caps, nametags and colorful banners to prevent getting separated from one's tourist group and accidently morphing into another group.

We had train tickets that afternoon for Beijing and we had to return to Xian by 5:15 or so. On the way to the terra cotta army we had a fast direct bus between Xian and the army site, but on the way back we accidently got on a local bus that made a stop every five minutes or so. The bus kindly had a big digital clock up at the front and so we were able to watch the minutes slowly tick away towards 5:00 and then slightly beyond. When we finally got back to Xian we had just enough time to run back to the hotel, grab our bags and dash into the train station to find that...we had just missed our train by about ten minutes! It was the first time I had missed a train, plane, etc. all during my trip, so I naturally blamed Sarah and Dalila (it was nobody's fault really). A helpful train official helped us to change our tickets to the next day (no extra charge!) and so we had another day in Xian and then on to Beijing.

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