China, Xi'an: Coffee Breaks with Terracotta Warriors

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With a population of over 6 and a half million and a history spanning 2000 years, Xi'an was not a city easy to ignore since it has been allowed to claim one of the most famous and significant archaeological discoveries in recent history. The famous Terracotta Warriors, which date back to the Qin Dynasty (211-206 BC), were discovered in 1974 by a group of peasants who were digging a well in an area outside Xi'an.

To get to Xi'an, so we could see the famous artifacts for ourselves, we travelled from Lanzhou on an overnight sleeper train; the trip was our first train journey in China and was quite nice. We had booked hard-sleeper seats on the train, which were essentially beds against the wall of a 6-berth cabin. For the people with middle or top seats, there was not much room to sit on the beds, but the train left after 10:00pm and we pretty much went straight to sleep. We had a trusty bowl of noodles first, though - every train in China provides boiled water and instant noodles were definitely the best way to go.

Before we knew it, the sun had risen and was beating through the window in our cabin. Therefore, we were wide awake by 7:00am, easily. That was okay because our train arrived in Xi'an just after 8:00am. At the train station, we were picked up by a couple of girls who worked at Xiangzimen Youth Hostel, where we had booked a room for the next four nights; they took us to the southern part of the old walled city of Xi'an, to check into our room. Four nights was essential for us in the city; we had planned in some rest time there before heading to our last two China destinations, Pingyao and Beijing.

The hostel was really nice, it had been newly built two months before our arrival. The inside of the place was like an ancient Chinese temple complex with several courtyards and small buildings off to the sides, each with a few rooms for guests to stay in. The place had a really nice restaurant that served excellent steamed pork and vegetable dumplings as well as wonton soup, and there was a fully equipped bar on the premises with a pool table and several board games. We had a lot of fun hanging out with the friendly staff at the bar and practicing our Chinese while playing several games of pool.

A lot of pool was played when we were in Xi'an; we really took advantage of the hostel's facilities. On the day we arrived, the power in the hostel was out because air conditioning units were being installed in some of the rooms. Therefore, we decided to have breakfast in the restaurant and play some pool whilst waiting for the power to come back on. The power didn't end up coming back on until late in the afternoon and we actually ended up playing pool until an hour after the power was working again - by our calculation, we think we played for 5-1/2 hours.

For the next couple of days, we both had very sore bums and sides from playing over 25 games of pool. Kyle had a stress injury on his wrist that luckily went away after a couple of days, and Dan thought he seriously hurt his lower back, but it was also okay later in the week. The people working in the hostel laughed at us for playing so much pool, but when we explained to them about our travels and how much we had been on the go for the past 4-1/2 months, they understood why we welcomed the break and enjoyed hanging out all day playing pool.

That first evening, after we had showered to remove the overnight train grime and sweat from playing so much pool in the heat of the day, we ventured out into Xi'an. The first thing we needed to do was to book our train tickets to Pingyao. The Xi'an train station was huge and we ended up asking directions from a couple of people once we got off the bus (the fare for a ticket was only 1 RMB, which was around 6p or 10 cents) we had taken from the area where our hostel was located.

The first person we had asked directions from pointed in the general direction of the train station - thanks a lot. The second person that we asked about directions to the ticket counter was a crazy nutter; this woman ended up following us the entire way to the station and waited next to us while we made our enquiries in the queue to purchase tickets; she actually acted like a looney by shadowboxing and swinging on the metal bars next to us whilst muttering away to herself in Chinese. We mentioned the word queue (line for the Americans reading this) loosely, as the Chinese don't queue that well and several of them jumped the queue in front of us, which was expected. At one point, Kyle rammed his arm out to block a woman from jumping in front of him in the queue, which gave him a lot of satisfaction even though the woman didn't appreciate it that much.

When we tried to purchase our tickets, we had to go to a different queue to buy advance tickets; somehow we had made it into the same-day ticket area. The crazy woman followed us, even though by then we didn't need any of her help. We finally convinced her to leave and she sauntered off, muttering to herself some more as well as repeating her shadowboxing routine. In the new queue, we were behind a man who purchased at least 60 train tickets, they kept coming out of the ticket printing machine for the ticket agent to double check, stamp and give to the man. Whilst we didn't really mind waiting that afternoon, the guy behind Dan stank and the odour seemed to get worse and worse, as more tickets were being printed in front of us.

By the time it was our turn to buy tickets, the woman working behind the counter had to get help from another woman who spoke English, because the tickets we wanted were not available and she could not explain this well with the few English words she knew. We had asked the hostel staff to write the Chinese characters for the tickets that we wanted, so we would be prepared and not face any hassles when purchasing them. What we didn't think of was the fact that the tickets may not have been available...

We thought that purchasing tickets to Pingyao four days in advance would be fine, especially since train tickets were not released earlier than five days in advance. Boy, were we wrong about that; there were no hard-sleeper or soft-sleeper seats at all on the overnight train that we wanted to take, and we ended up settling for hard seats on the daytime train that would leave the day after our intended travel date. For those of you who don't know, the "sleeper" seats are actually beds, and hard versus soft denotes the thickness of the mattress as well as the number of beds in a section (hard = 6 beds and soft = 4 beds).

The hard seats were absolutely atrocious on the train we took from Xi'an and, while you will no doubt here more about the terrible first hour of our train journey when you read our Pingyao journal entry, let's just say that neither of us will EVER purchase hard seat tickets again, and let's also say that it was a good thing neither of us went to jail on the day we travelled to Pingyao, as we almost lost it, trying to upgrade our seats to get out of cattle class. Even writing about it now is causing our blood to boil, so we must get our focus back to Xi'an, the lovely city that it is.

After we had sorted our train tickets, we took a bus to Bell Tower Square in the centre of the walled part of Xi'an. The large tower there was beautiful by day and night and we decided to base ourselves in the area quite a bit over the next few days, as it was a very modern and clean area of the city, with many shopping malls, restaurants and cafes that were all close to our hostel. We found a home away from home in a brand new Starbucks where we were roped in by the friendly staff there. We spent a lot of time planning our upcoming US trip and catching up on our journal entries. Whilst spending time in Starbucks, we also got to talk with several friendly locals over many frappuccinos.

To see the Terracotta Warriors, we booked a tour through Xiangzimen Youth Hostel. They provided an English-speaking tour guide and driver, and there were two other people on the tour that day, a couple from the Netherlands. On the way to the Terracotta Warriors, we visited Banpo Neolithic Village which was another amazing archaeological find in the area. The village dated back 6000 years and archaeologists have been able to ascertain how the villagers lived, based on everything they have uncovered.

Before reaching the Terracotta Warriors, we had to walk through a silk factory. The purpose was not to inform us about the silk making process; instead, it was set up to get us to buy silk products that were made there. However, they figured us wrong, as we found the process really interesting and we both kept throwing out many questions at the silk factory guide, who was trying to speed us through all of the exhibits to get us into the shop at the end of the quick tour.

At the factory, we saw silkworms being bred and the two different types of cocoons that were used there. We watched a woman soak cocoons in water before breaking them open and throwing out the creature inside. Then, she started pulling the raw silk off the cocoon and stretching it over a small arched metal bar, layer upon layer of the stuff. Next, we were taken to a table where a group of four or five women was stretching swathes of silk (now dried) from the arched metal bars into duvet-sized pieces.

It was quite amazing how much the silk stretched after it dried, and also how the silk stuck together so well. Most of all, we were amazed at the amount of silk and number of worms needed to form enough silk cocoons to sustain the factory's business. The silk factory salesman was not happy when we declined the tea on offer and skipped the last room of the factory, which was a huge shop full of silk products, but we were very happy and smugly smiled as we walked back the way we had come from the entrance of the factory.

There was one more tourist trap that we had to endure before being granted a glimpse of the Terracotta Warriors. This was a terracotta warrior, and other terracotta figurine, factory. This was okay because no one was in our faces trying to sell something, but there was a really large shop at the end of this "tour" that had many different Chinese souvenirs, all priced about 5-6 times what we have seen in the markets we have visited. Apparently, you can buy life-sized warriors to stick in your back garden. A few of you lucky readers should keep an eye on the post (that's referring to mail for the Americans reading this) as we may have sent some out to those people not leaving comments on our journal entries.

Finally, we were taken to see the Terracotta Warriors. They were amazing.

Seriously, we were astounded to know that the warriors had been sitting underneath the ground for so many years, buried and preserved as well as they were. Of course, most of the warriors had to be glued back together because a peasant revolt against the Qin Dynasty 2000 years ago caused many of the warriors to be burnt and smashed to pieces. The fire caused the paint on most of the warriors to peel off, but there were some warriors not affected by the fire. When the archaeologists uncovered these warriors, the paint immediately disintegrated when it was exposed to the air.

There were four large museums on the grounds where the warriors were discovered. In the main museum, there were 6000 warriors and several horses, standing at attention. The figures all displayed different facial expressions and characteristics and they seemed very lifelike; they were cast as replicas of the actual soldiers around during the time of the Qin Dynasty and the warriors were holding real weapons when they were buried. 10,000 of the weapons were uncovered when the warriors were found, but these were all locked away in a vault out of public view, so we didn't get to see them.

The other three museums housing warriors and horses were much smaller than the main one, but no less impressive. We spent over an hour walking around the museums and trying to get a feel for the awesome magnitude of the army. We learned, from our guide that day, that the warriors were positioned underground in the actual battle formation used by the Qin Dynasty at that time in history. We also learned how to pronounce several useless Chinese phrases from the Romance section of our Mandarin phrasebook; our guide was embarrassed more than once when we (mostly Kyle) started spouting off phrases such as "I love you" and "you're a fantastic dancer" to random Chinese tourists.

When we had finished looking at the warriors in all four museums, we left the complex and were taken through a large strip of souvenir shops before arriving at the minivan we had ridden in earlier that day. The next stop was at our hostel, and we were ready to relax after a long day of sightseeing and walking around in the extremely hot sun. That evening, we played several games of pool and drank some Chinese beers with Jack, one of the staff members at the hostel. He was working so we kept his beer hidden so he could drink and play pool with us.

The other main sight that we saw in Xi'an was the Muslim Quarter, a neighbourhood just west of Bell Tower Square with many shops and restaurants on its main tree-lined street. After having some lunch in the Muslim Quarter, we went to see China's biggest mosque, which is aptly named "Great Mosque", although it didn't seem very big to us.

Walking to Great Mosque, we had to endure several stall owners trying to get us to purchase their goods at the Huajue Xiang Market. To walk around Great Mosque and its courtyards and gardens, we paid 25 RMB each (almost £2, or $3.70) and we felt that we had been cheated as it was not that much different from a Chinese temple, albeit a few Arabic words written on some of the doorways and buildings.

We mentioned our time hanging out in Starbucks and at our hostel. The only other sights worth mentioning would be the Drum Tower, a large and beautiful tower that marked the entrance to the Muslim Quarter, and a small DVD shop that we found in the centre of town. The DVD shop owner was really helpful and spoke great English; we ended up buying another stack of DVDs from her as she had many recent titles, all of very high quality.

One more thing to remember was a crazy man who we said "ni hao" to when we passed him in the street. He started spouting off loads of phrases at us and at times was yelling, pointing his finger wildly and spitting on us as he spoke. Everyone passing by, for the 10 minutes that he appeared to be scolding us, looked sympathetic to our plight but didn't do a thing about it. We finally managed to walk away from the insane man and we still have no idea as to what he was talking about, or why he started ranting at us.

After relaxing for a few days, the time came for us to travel to Pingyao. We were getting really comfortable at our hostel and were sad to leave the city. However, the show must go on, and we needed to strap on our backpacks and hit the road. Getting to the train station was no problem, we hopped in a taxi and paid the cheap fare to get to the northern part of the old walled city.

Once on the train, we were shocked at the conditions in the carriage where our seats were located. There was over a hundred people in one carriage; every seat was full and the aisles were crammed full of people, too. There was no way we could endure a 9-hour train journey in those conditions, so what began was a frustrating and terrible ordeal that thankfully was resolved for us. Read on in the next journal entry to find out what happened to us on the train that day.