Xi'an and the Terra Cotta Westerners

I left early morning (5am) from Beijing to head to Xi'an, home of the Terracotta Warriors. I was exhausted from lack of sleep from the week, so I was planning on crashing once I arrived before heading out. I got there and got to my hotel, where the manager's name was "Jim Beam" (his english name). He was SOOOO funny , spoke excellent English, got me set on a tour, and is my point man for getting a visa to get into Tibet (you need special goverment permissions).

So after a quick nap I was out on the town. I hopped on a bus and headed to the Muslim district. Xi'an is known for having a large muslim population. When I arrived, I saw a couple cool sites, the Bell Tower, and the Drum Tower. The bells signal sunrise, and the drums signal sunset (Xi'an people were famous for music and architecture, but apparently not their eyesight). In the Bell Tower there was a performance by some traditionally clad women, who played several songs on this large set of bells. If you bought a drink, you could sit in these comfy chairs, so i decided to sit down and have a beer. I asked for one, and the woman looked at me, said something back I didn't understand, and came back a bit later with some tea. Almost like a beer. It was pretty good though. There were lots of Chinese people trying to cheat the system and sit down without buying a drink. A man sitting next to me was asked to leave by the waitress. A Chinese woman with 4 children sat down, and they asked her to leave too, but she was having lots of troubles holding 2 children at once. She eventually ordered a drink, which I heard. So when they brought the beer, I asked how much it was, they responded (in chinese) "this wasn't mine", but I didn't believe them, so I paid for it when i coaxed the price out of them. Turns out I paid for her drink! Everyone kept telling me how nice I was when I completely did this by accident. Sorry Rachel, I'm hitting on women with 4 kids. They also said before one of the songs it was an english song, and they played jingle bells!

I wandered into the muslim district, where I found a stand selling something which i can only describe as peanut butter covered rice cake with fruit filling. It was SOOOO good. I have no idea exactly what it was, but it was yummy (and only 12 cents). I bought one, then found some yummy lamb that I got (with a beer finally). The food was SO spicy, thank God for the beer. I wandered to the grand Mosque which was amazing. So beautiful and peaceful inside. I took a bus from there to the Small Goose Pagoda, which was interesting. Climbed up 15 stories. I went on to the big goose pagoda which was much more fun. It is next to a park, where there was a water show that had a couple thousand people watching. It was so much fun to people watch. Often times, you find yourself in contrived cultural situations as a tourist (ancient costume and dance that they'd never do if it weren'ta tourist attraction) so finding actual events is always fun.

After watching the show, I sat and read for a bit. After a short while, some students came up to me and wanted to talk. We talked in Chinese and English for a while, they were having lots of fun. They taught me to say "I have friends in Xi'an." I also held several babies. No idea why I became such a popular attraction there (though I didn't see any other foreigners)

The next day, I went with a tour group to see Terracotta warriors. When we first arrived, and they show you the pit, it's pretty damn amazing. There are SOOO many soldiers there. The unfortunate bit is you don't get to go down in them, which I had imagined. The next 2 pits they show you are underwhelming. Each soldier looks different, they are all life sized, and apparently the Emperor who had them made spent 1/3 of China's tax money for 40 years constructing the site. I was a little blown away by that, and wondered what you'd get spending that amount of the US's tax money for that long (maybe a military that's stretched too thin and overworked?)

We went to lunch where I had some terrible beef dish. I got to know the other tour people, there was a french couple, a dutch couple, two girls from Norway, and a German guy. It was a great group, we had a lot of fun together. Hello everyone if you read this! The rest of the sites we saw were kinda boring and underwhelming after terra cotta, though we did see a hotsprings where they used to have a palace that was home to the famed Xi'an incident (Chang Kai Shek's capture).

Now I'm back in Beijing, time for another week of work!