Terra Cotta Soldiers - 兵马俑

While in Xi'an, one must venture to the legendary Terra Cotta Soldiers (兵马俑). Discovered in 1974, this incredible archaeological site boasts three massive "pits" filled with ornately sculpted clay warriors. The most impressive fact is that Emperor Qin demanded each warrior be individually sculpted, so that no two were alike. Therefore, they started building this "mausoleum" for him when he was only 13 years of age. I'll spare you the other historical details, since you probably already know a bit about it. If not, read more about it here.

Pit 1, the most impressive collection of all.

Housed in a massive airplane hangar, it takes

nearly 30 minutes just to walk around it. 

The width of Pit 1

Close-up in Pit 1

"Famous" row of horses. If you look close,

the left-most horse is missing his tail. 

While visiting this site, President Clinton "patted" 

the horse's tail, and knocked it clean off.

Pit 2. The remains of another army, but 

this one was ransacked by thieves centuries ago.

One of the better-preserved soldiers.

The world's two largest fully-functional marionettes

.... why not? ....

In addition to the Terra Cotta Soldiers, we visited several other places within Xi'an, essentially a bunch of museums. One of my favorite non-museum places in Xi'an was the China-Muslim Mosque, which combined with the early dawn dew and the misty weather produced a surprisingly peaceful getaway. 

Not the best weather for walking, 

but very zen-like. 

The courtyard of the Mosque

But the fun didn't end with the sights and weather of Xi'an. (oh, I forgot to mention that it rained nonstop for the 70 or so hours we were there.) Story time! At 6:30pm on Saturday night, we arrived at the Xi'an train station for our 7:30 pm train to Beijing. We soon discovered that our train had been delayed for 6 hours, destined to leave at 1:30 am because of severe flooding along the tracks. So, what exactly are 90 students supposed to do for 6 hours? Sit at the train station? To pass the time, I busted out my Xun (a small pot-shaped ocarina), and started playing right in the middle of the train station. Thankfully, CET spent only 15 minutes conceiving a great plan, where we went to another super luxurious hotel and hung out, 5 people to a room, until the train was supposed to leave. 


So by 1 am, we had expected to leave the hotel, but my group still hadn't heard anything from CET. Starting to get a little worried, we went to go find the teachers, who told us the train had been further delayed, and that we could get some sleep. Finally feeling like something was going our way, we brushed our teeth and headed to sleep. BAM. Literally 4 minutes after I laid down, a teacher slams on our door and tells us to haul ass to the train station, because our train is leaving in 30 minutes! 


Five minutes later, we're all bookin' it to the train station, and after we arrive at 2:30 am, we get some more unpleasant news. The departure time is now 3:30 am. Groaning, tired and frustrated, we sat down stood in the train station waiting for another hour. And then at 3:30 am, we hear an announcement in fuzzy Chinese come across the PA system. Guess what? 4:30 am departure. Super. 

At 4:55 am we FINALLY boarded the damn train, and everyone passed out in their beds. Surprisingly, I slept pretty decently, for about 7 hours. At about half-past noon on Sunday, I wake up, sit up, and promptly smack the @#$% out of my head on the train ceiling, bringing me sharply back to reality. I then was informed that we had only traveled 1/5 of the "11-hour" train ride. In 7 hours. 

In the end, we made it back to Beijing 16 hours later than expected, and still had to wake up for 8 am class the next day. I almost always love being here in China, but sometimes, I just want to beat trains with a golf club.

Xi'an, Why Are You So Far Away?

         AND WHY THE @#$% ARE WE ARRIVING AT 5:20 AM?!?! 

If you know me, you know that I don't operate before the hours of ... morning. Let's rewind a bit... last Thursday, July 22, we departed for Xi'an at about 3 pm, and after an 11-hour train ride, arrived at 5 am earrrrrrrrrly Friday morning (yes, I know the math doesn't add up, there was other travel in the mix). Thankfully we had "beds" (planks of wood with sheets on top), so I slept about 5 hours. 

At this point, CET decided to play a little game. This game turned out to be a 12-hour scavenger hunt, which started like this. "Okay, I hope you enjoyed the train ride, see you at the hotel!" And just left us there. So after 30 minutes of scrambling around to find a taxi-driver that actually knew where our hotel was, we got to the hotel by 6:15 am ... only to get more fun games from CET. The scavenger hunt mandated that we go to 5 different historic places around the city, all before 6 pm. Then we could turn in our answers to various questions, for the chance to win 400-650 RMB for our team. Our team consisted of 5 people: me, my roommate, and three other students, one of whom was fluent in Chinese. So, at the very least, we had 2 fluent speakers of Chinese, and absolutely zero knowledge of Xi'an. (if you also have no knowledge of Xi'an, read this!)

The first place we went to was the Chinese-Muslim district, where they had some of the strangest foods I had ever seen. We had to sample three types of food, and we chose to sample burnt rice topped with black dates, a delicious fried bun filled with syrup, and a mutton soup that numbed your entire mouth (had a spice called 麻, sorry, I don't know the English, although all the dictionaries call it Hemp.... lol). Following this, we went to Starbucks and had a real breakfast, we were all half-dead from exhaustion. 

at least it was a kick-ass Starbucks...

We spent the rest of the day traveling to museums and historic sites. I'm going to condense this into a few pictures, since most of the places we went weren't super interesting, unless you love museums. (some of these pictures span two days)

We stayed in the most luxurious hotel I've ever seen.

This picture doesn't fully do it justice

We went to the city walls, which extend as far

as the eye can see. In ancient times, the walls

were 7.5 times longer than they are today ... wow.

And they had cannons, which I promptly rode...

to the great displeasure of the security attendants.

From there, we moved on to a Buddhist museum.

The actual Confucian analects tablets. 

This was kind of humbling to see.

(at a separate museum)

Ancient seals (name engravings) at another museum

These were 4000+ years old, preserved underground.

Underground remnants of pottery and such. 

By far the coolest museum, as the museum 

itself was physically located underground.

Most of this occurred during the scavenger hunt, but a few of the museum shots were from museums we went to after visiting the legendary Terra Cotta Soldiers (my next post). 

Finally, the WORLD'S BEST ENGRISH.

the back of a condom wrapper in our hotel.

More Than Enough Kevins in Beijing

On July 20th, another one of my good high school friends, Kevin Watford, came in to hang out and experience Beijing. Yep, the same Kevin I went to visit about 6 weeks in Shanghai. Sadly, I had quite a busy week, and we only got to hang out a few times. Tuesday night, after I finished all my work, we headed to the famous shopping district of Wangfujing to check out the goods. 

Wangfujing is one of those places that embodies the typical juxtaposition of new, luxurious China, and the absolute shit that is the older Chinese hutongs (dirty, back alleys). But, for me, the best part of China is seeing these hutongs, where all kinds of dirty business goes down. Bargaining is a must, which is a talent of mine, since I love yelling at people in Chinese, and am relatively stubborn. They also had Chuanr (串) of every kind, which is basically meat, fruit, veggies, or (apparently) insects skewered on a stick and grilled or boiled. Here, the specialty was cockroaches, or LIVE scorpions on a stick. By live, I mean that they were still moving, and you picked one and watched as they slapped live insects on a grill. Sadly, I don't have photos, but here's someone else's photos.

The next day, Wednesday, we headed out to Summer Palace (颐和园), which is what it sounds like, the place where the emperor would take his "summer vacation." And what a vacation home. We spent about five hours here just walking around, then hiked up to the very top to see a breathtaking view of nearly all of Beijing and KunMing Lake. Pictures to follow.

Entrance Plaque: Yi He Yuan

An ornate gate, serving essentially no real purpose

Where else can you get hundreds of slaves to 

decorate the underside of your roof?

Kevin Watford's dad pointed out this:

each stone was placed by hand into the sidewalk. 

There's got to be over a mile of this ornate sidewalk,

with flowers and other designs inlaid into the pavement.

I guess when you have unlimited free Chinese slave labor,

anything's possible!

The summer palace is bordered by the beautiful KunMing Lake

Then we climbed to the very top

On the way, a woman was doing the typical 

over-priced "write your name in some Asian style"

In addition to some Buddhist temples, 

the very top had some incredible views

including the lake, where you can apparently rent 

paddle boats or take a ride on this dragon-boat thing

After heading to Summer Palace, I had to return home to study for my test. Then on Thursday, we only had time to get lunch, because CET was taking us on a three-day trip to Xi'an. Xi'an was quite a trip, more on that next time. 

Zoo+Houhai+Cole

Cole, a good friend from high school happened to venture into Beijing this past week, so I showed him the unique parts of Beijing that his family's tour wasn't going to cover. Okay, well, some of them, we didn't have much time. Turns out the most interesting pictures come from the Beijing Zoo, which is utterly massive, and an area of Beijing known as Houhai, which is a gorgeous lake area in the daytime and a crazy bar scene at night. And of course, we went to a couple traditional Beijing restaurants, but kinda ran out of time to do much of anything else, since my school schedule plus his ridiculous tour schedule did not workout well. Now his family and the tour group are in Xi'an for a few days, then off to so many other places; the tour sounds amazing. 


This morning we had midterms, which covered 763 new words (yes, we counted), 14 lessons worth of grammar, and a 10 minute speech. Luckily, it sounds worse than it actually was. Now that it's over, I can relax for... 1 day. But next week another one of my good friends from high school, Kevin Watford, who I visited in Shanghai a few weeks ago, is coming up to Beijing with his father to explore the city. And yes, it is crazy awesome that two of my friends randomly decided to pop over to China at the same time, considering that we all scheduled our respective trips separately. 


Tonight we're headed to Laoshe Chaguan, a play called Tea House written by a famous Chinese author called.... Laoshe. Not only is it a traditional Chinese performance, but we also get served traditional snacks and teas, which I'm excited about. I'm sure pictures will be forbidden again, just like the Chinese Acrobatics, so you'll have to live with some pandas for now. 

the zoo had better scenery than the "scenic spots"

ridiculous rhino collection... there were 6 huge ones

where else can you PET zebras

and of course the treasured, priceless, and 

mind-boggingly boring great panda.

as shown here, wasting my time.

the beautiful sights of Houhai

some guy was doing calligraphy with water 

and a brush the size of a baseball bat

each bar has these eclectic couches outside, 

but nothing can beat a Michael Jackson theme