18th March - Xi'an

I felt very ropey when we woke up this morning but after tea in bed from Emma and toast in bed from Matt, I started to feel more human again.

We'd arranged to go and see the Terracotta Warriors with James and were planning to try to make it by public transport instead of taking a pricey tour. It all ran quite smoothly but after a late start and 2 fairly long bus rides, we were concerned that 2.30 was quite late to be getting there. We needn't have worried because, although it was interesting, there wasn't that much to see.

We were found by a very sweet tour guide called Lena, and she encouraged Matt and James to use their driving licenses to get the student discount, saving them half of the hefty £15 entrance fee. She agreed to show us the pits backwards because we'd read that it was better to save the best until last. She also confirmed what we'd heard about Emporer Qin Shi Huang's tomb not being worth the long walk to see it because it hadn't been excavated and was basically just a hill.  It is believed that there are rivers of mercury running through it.
The surroundings of the warriors was not at all what any of us were expecting. We'd expected more of the 'farmland' that they were found on and instead it was all concrete and airport hanger style buildings.
The first pit we looked at had not been excavated fully yet. It is called the 'command centre' and the soldiers there are the generals and the higher ranking officers. They have been pieced together carefully and reinstated into formation in one section but there are also areas where there are piles of crumbling soldiers still piled on the ground and partially covered by earth.

The second pit contains around 1300 warriors and horses and is still being excavated. From what I could gather, they did not want to excavate all areas yet and are waiting until they had found a way to preserve the paint on the soldiers because it had very quickly eroded from the quarry that they'd dug up previously. Only one bit of colour remained on one soldier and he was kept in a glass case.

The third pit was definitely the most impressive and contained row upon row of terracotta soldiers, each with unique faces and markings. 2000 are on show but it is believed that there are 6000 soldiers here - it really brought home how vast and crazy the whole endeavour was. The thought of the work and craftsmanship that went into them is mind-blowing and the murder of all of those who slaved away to make them is unthinkable.
In typical Chinese style, it is possible to get special photographs of the warriors. Because you can't go near them, they have stands with carved backdrops where you can have your picture taken so it looks as though you are stood amongst them. Stranger still, it is also possible to get your face super-imposed onto a warriors body. The example pictures on the wall were really quite frightening.

Lena was very interesting to talk to and was really interested in comparing countries ao we learned as much about China as we did about the warriors. One of the stranger things that we found out was that Chinese people find 'double eyelids' more attractive and that some people even have plastic surgery to add an extra layer of eyelid. It hadn't even registered with any of us that there was such variation in eyelids and so we spent much of the time after we found out just staring at people and identifying their eyelid type.

After we said goodbye to Lena, we decided to treat our hangovers to a Dico's. It tuned out to be like KFC but not so nice but it did do the trick and set us up for a long bus journey.

Back at the train station we were planning to book the tickets to go to Shanghai tomorrow but the queue to even get into the station was insane. There were several and they stretched the whole length of the station so we decided to leave it until tomorrow and go to say our goodbyes to Emma, who was leaving for Pingyao.
The second bus back to the hostel stopped in a bit of a strange place and at a weird angle but everyone got off so we followed. I noticed that the bus in front of us was also parked at a jaunty angle and that there was a guy sat in front of it, looking dazed and holding his head. I thought that he'd been hit by the bus and we were about to go and see if he was okay when the bus driver appeared. He was holding a tyre iron and was clearly the cause of the guy's injuries as a nu,ber of passengers were holdinghim back to prevent him having another go. We bid a hasty retreat and went to say our goodbyes instead.