Xi'an and the Terracotta Army
Trip Start
May 02, 2007
1
49
70
Trip End
Ongoing
Xi'an,
China
Monday, November 19, 2007
As soon as we arrived in Xi'an, we hooked up with Caroline and Andy, a British couple we'd met way back in Ulan Bator and who we'd bumped into again in Pingyao. We took the one hour bus ride out to the Army in the early afternoon, and were a little surprised at how everything looked. We'd expected a whole lot of dirt with excavated pits with the Terracotta Army below, but the exhibit is very modern and housed in massive concrete hangars. We were harassed by people selling souvenirs on the walk in and the walk out of the exhibit
The Terracotta Army
. As usual, the place was packed with tour groups, some tourists not even really looking at the Army, just getting their picture snapped and moving on. It was a bit anti-climatic, but in all honesty we had zero expectations when we went there, hence no disappointment.We do have one little interesting story to tell actually. On the overnight train ride from Pingyao to Xi'an (in hard sleeper - an open carriage configuration with bunk beds stacked three high), I woke - even with earplugs in - to sounds of sobbing. From my top level bunk I looked down to the bottom and saw a Chinese girl, maybe twenty years old, crying and choking on her coughs, thrashing about semi-violently in her bed. She woke the entire carriage of sixty some-odd people and everyone was peering from their bunks to watch. It took a full ten minutes for anyone Chinese to get up and see what was wrong. Another ten minutes later an attendant came. They helped her off at the next stop and that was the end of that. Yvonne later told me that before she started crying she had climbed up to Yvonne's top bunk and tugged on the jacket she was using as a secondary pillow that was snuggled under her head. Weird. Apparently not learning our lesson in Russia, we made another pact from then on that we would take soft sleeper - a four bed private compartment - the rest of the way in China.
