Xi'an: Wet and Warrioriffic!

Early Saturday morning, we disembarked from our train and headed out into Xi'an. Outside the station there were some people waiting with signs to pick other people up, and a lot of people waiting for nobody in particular. With our extra-touristy vibe, we immediately attracted some guys who wanted us to pay 500 kuai to hire a car for the day. We bu yao and bu yonged them thoroughly ("don't want" and "don't need"), but eventually agreed to pay 20 kuai for them to take us all to the Ryan's hotel in a van. Getting to the van was an exciting time, as we steered our suitcases around numerous puddles and crossed a busy intersection in a haphazard and fairly diagonal fashion.

At the hotel, the driver hung around, hoping that we would still take him up on his offer. We could have taken taxis around all day with the kind of money they wanted, but when I told the guy so he lowered his offer, and eventually we settled on 300. Finding taxis on a rainy day is hard, anyway.

With a car hired, we were off on the long road outside the city to get to the famous terracotta warriors. We visited a factory where they made replica warriors, and also where we ran into this fearsome character:


At the terracotta warrior museum, we checked out a bunch of kind of random exhibits on the history of the museum before making it into the actual warrior pits. I had been there 2 years previous, and I could tell that there had been some further excavation, although they do it veeeery slowly.

The warriors are pretty amazing, especially if you think about how much effort goes into making just one terracotta warrior. First you make a hollow body out of coils and coils of clay layered on top of each other. Then you mold bits of clay onto the outside to look like a person, and sculpt each one with unique hairstyle and facial features, and with different dress according to rank. After that, the warriors can be fired in a giant oven and finally, painted. Repeat this process thousands and thousands of times, and presto, your burial grounds are ready! You've got about 2000 years of nice resting time before some jerks dig the place up.



We were feeling pretty hungry post-warriors, but it was rather chilly outside, and since it was the slow season for tourists, none of the restaurants had bothered to turn on their heat. We ended up at the one oasis of warmth, where the bathrooms are clean and the food is reliably decent: KFC. After luxuriating in a bathroom with toilet paper and functional hot water taps and soap and an awesome hand dryer, we enjoyed some traditional KFC food, plus hot egg tarts for all (not available at your US KFC!). KFC also has napkins, another feature that is not exactly a given in Chinese restaurants. We were loving it.



We spent so long warrioring and chilling in KFC that eventually our driver got impatient and came to look for us. When we were good and ready, we trucked on back into the city and headed for the Muslim Quarter. (Xi'an is home to a number of Hui people, a Muslim minority group)

My idea in the Muslim Quarter was to go to the Great Mosque, but it turns out that the way to the Great Mosque goes through a bustling Muslim market, so it took us kind of a long time to get there because we kept accidentally stopping and buying things. I obtained a colorful pashmina (the only thing I bargained for this whole trip that was actually for me), and my mom got, among other things, a foot-high terracotta warrior to put in the garden. Cute. There were a bunch of funny little floury-looking balls for sale, but I didn't know what they were, so I asked a vendor what they were made of. She responded with a startlingly vehement, "NO!" After some explanation I was told that the balls needed to be boiled before eating, but still, it's not like I was trying to eat one then and there!

We did get to the Great Mosque eventually, and it was nice and peaceful and picturesque. Although it's a tourist attraction, people still actually worship there, and we were quite impressed by how well the mosque and the local Muslim community had maintained through those extra-anti-religion days under Communist rule. A nice man at the mosque told me about the people who come to pray there, and afterwards, discovering I was American, proceeded to expound at length about his favorite NBA players. This guy knew about a bajillion times more about the NBA than I do. (Just like Taiwanese schoolchildren know more about American baseball than I do...oh well)

It was getting lateish and we had to catch a train back to Beijing that night, so we only made one more stop in the market: dinner. We had to take advantage of the authentic Muslim community to enjoy some traditional Xinjiang food: spicy lamb kebabs and naan. A delicious finale to our day in Xi'an.

From the Muslim Quarter, we hopped an extra-ghetto cab to the train station. The front passenger side door didn't seem to close properly, and when I pushed on it to prove to my parents that it was secure, it popped right open as we were driving. Whoops. At least I wore the seat belt, which was missing the part across the lap.

Unfortunately, we didn't luck out into getting our own compartment on the train back. Dad was in one compartment with some other family, and Mom and I were in the one next to him, along with a couple and their little 4-year-old daughter. It was awkward at first, but then I talked to the little girl a little bit, and then talked to her mom, and they were very nice. The father came in and tried to talk to Dad in Chinese, but I informed him it was useless. "Your father's mustache is very beautiful," he told me. I passed the message on.