Hi from China, thanks to Sean D. for helping me find a way to write blog posts via e-mail, but I did it wrong at first, so this post is a bit old. In China, Blogspot.com is blocked for various reasons.
We are now in Xi'an, the ancient capitol city of China. Several dynasties were based here, and it's now famous for the army of terracotta warriors. Basically, one of China's more powerful emperors about 2,000 years ago, in preparation for his death, had an army of warriors built out of terracotta for him to be placed in his tomb. Apparently the reason he built them was because he wanted to be able to defend himself and his empire in the afterlife. He thought they'd come alive. The statues average 1.9 meters tall, and are all are unique. Google it for pictures - we will post our own when we can. There are 6,000 statues on display and they think that amounts to about 1% of the total number. It took 70,000 people 37 years to build. There is apparently also a vault somewhere containing a miniature copy of the kingdom, with the emperor's coffin floating on a river of mercury. This has yet to be excavated, apparently.
And get this - the only reason the army was built out of terracotta was because someone talked the emperor out of burying his real army alive.
Also, the original plan was to have all 70,000 workers buried alive with the tomb as well, so no one would know where the entrance is and rob it. But the workers caught wind of this and revolted, burning down the roof of the vault, crushing all the warriors. So the ones we see today have been restored.
The tomb was pretty fantastic and I recommend that anyone who can, come to see it. But come on a package tour. Traveling in China independently has proven to be exceedingly difficult. For starters, finding someone who speaks English is next to impossible. This is a particular problem in restaurants, where you have no idea what you are ordering. You have to find a place with a picture menu, which is in itself a chore. It's funny, whenever we go out to eat, it attracts about four dozen employees, so by the time we are done ordering we have a whole entourage around us trying to figure out what we want. Even words you think might be universal, such as "Coca-Cola" or "Internet", are different in Chinese. God bless our Mandarin phrasebook.
Thus the title of this blog. I have never been so happy to see McDonald's in my life. Usually, we go out for one meal per day that's adventurous, then go somewhere safe for the other meal. Yesterday we managed to have a good lunch (Peking duck, yum) and a double cheeseburger with fries for dinner. I feel bad doing this, because the food in China is supposed to be great, but honestly we are having trouble dealing with it. Dumplings are somewhat reliable, and you can usually get some kind of stir fry with rice.
Traveling in China is also exceedingly hard. We wanted to take a train from Beijing to here, and we found out all the trains were booked for the following week. So we had to fly. But we couldn't book online. You have to go through a travel agent and have your tickets delivered physically - even for e-tickets. Which is pretty ridiculous if you ask me. Booking our travel to Xi'an took about an hour with our English speaking concierge in Beijing. It would have been utterly impossible without his help. Thankfully, hotel bookings are a bit easier, we have found Expedia to be invaluable.
Once we got here to Xi'an, no one at the hotel spoke English so we were on our own to find our onward ticket. So we went to the train station. After weaving our way through the throngs of people outside, and waiting in the wrong line twice, we finally found the ticket hall. It had 25 windows open, with about 50 people in each line. It was a madhouse. People in China don't understand the concept of waiting in line. Once up front, we realized why it took a half hour to get there - people were shoving their way to the front and blatantly cutting. Luckily we had our desired train written down, and we were able to purchase a ticket, albeit not in the class we wanted and a day later than we wanted.
Xi'an is a nice town, it still has city walls and there are three dozen universities or colleges here. Tonight, we are taking an overnight sleeper train south to a city called Chongqing (capital of Szechuan province). They say the food there is great, but we're not staying, as we are getting off the train and onto a boat on the Yangtze river. Besides, even if we did stay, I am not sure I'd be able to order food anyway.
The boat lets us off in a town called Yichang, then we'll have a week to make it back to Beijing. We leave China on August 1. This means that we will be completely offline for at least the next four days while we are the boat.
China's proving hard, but we are coping OK and managing to keep our bellies full. We are taking precautions against pickpockets and such, and we're staying totally safe here.
No comments:
Post a Comment