Spitting & Soldiers

anyone for crickets
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We took an overnight train from Pingyao to Xi'an which was hardly the best nights sleep as spitting seems to be a national pastime here. If spitting was an Olympic event in Beijing next year the Chinese would take all three medals. We had a spitting woman on our train who coughed up phlem all night every few minutes and spat it out of the window, apparently the taxi drivers in Beijing have been told to clean up there spitting act for the olympics in 08.

Our train arrived in Xi'an late and it was peeing it down, our hostel failed to pick us up so we fought for a taxi, it rained most of the day so later we wandered around the city and into the muslim quarter, where you can pretty much buy fake anything down the narrow lanes. We were sure we got ripped off at dinner where we had another hotpot kebab feast, we kicked up a fuss as there seems to be two prices one for locals and one for tourists, we managed to get a quarter off the bill but Gail still moaned all the way back to the hostel.

bell tower xi'an
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The main reason for being in Xi'an was to visit the terracotta warriors which we did via local transport. Even though it is a big tourist site it was one of the most impressive things we had seen so far in China. The warriors were made for the afterlife and to protect the tomb of the first emperor to unify china, 'Qin Shi Huang'. There are 6000 warriors and horses in pit 1, 1300 in pit 2 and 72 in pit 3, which is said to be the headquarters as the higher ranking officers are here. All the warriors have unique characteristics, it took ten years to complete the army and 38 years to complete his tomb.