Over 8,000

(Mark)

Blargh I am sick again.

So today was our first full day in Xi’an, home of the Terra-Cotta Warriors. Before seeing any of that fun stuff, however, we had to have breakfast. Normally I wouldn’t comment on that, but the restaurant in this hotel is AMAZING. It has two sections… I think one is for dinner and one is for breakfast. The breakfast one is a little less cool, but it still had armchairs at some of the tables, which were really comfortable. But the dinner section… it was HUGE. It’s a three-story room, decorated with giant Chinese luck knots and fake palm trees. There’s a very small moat going around the room, which is full of goldfish. It was all very cool.

ANYWAY, after breakfast, we headed out to the Terra-Cotta factory type thing, AKA the place where they now make Terra-Cotta replicas. Basically, they just showed us how the Terra-Cotta warriors were made (which is largely how they’re still made today). They pretty much just take clay, put them in warrior-shaped molds, carve out the details, and fire them. As we walked around the building, we couldn’t help noticing the shelves upon shelves of mini Terra-Cotta warriors all lined up, which made it look like they’re actually mass produced. They’re not, however, each one is made by hand, which is pretty cool. After seeing that, we headed to the actual Terra-Cotta Museum, where the actual warriors are. For those who don’t know anything about them, you should look them up because I don’t remember everything—there’s been SO much going on here that it’s getting hard to remember the details, and I forgot to take notes. I do remember that they were built for the tomb of the first emperor of the Qin Dynasty, but that he died before the project was completed. They’re something like 2 to 3 thousand years old, and they were destroyed by a Qin-opposing army, but many of them have been restored, and some even still have color.  It is estimated that there were originally over 8,000 soldiers initially buried, but many of them still lie shattered on the ground. It was quite amazing to actually see something in PERSON that I once thought I’d only ever see pictures of. Yeah, it was cool.

After the Terra-Cotta Warriors, we headed to a hot spring, made famous for the love tragedy during the Tang Dynasty (or maybe Song, sorry guys!), as well as the kidnapping of Chiang Kai Shek. The spring was pretty cool, it was basically split up into the old and the new, but everything was the traditional Chinese style that you always see in pictures and such. The water was 40 degrees Celsius or so, making it VERY enticing as a nice hot tub, but we opted out of taking a bath.

We then went to get foot massages, which were very…. Interesting. The girls weren’t expecting male masseuses, so they found that very awkward. Alex and I just found it very awkward to have women rubbing our feet… it was very strange. It also kind of hurt. The last adjective I would use to describe it would be “relaxing.” At one point, they sat behind us, and pulled us back so that we were lying on them… Our heads DEFINITELY were resting in places they shouldn’t have been…

So after that we had our dumpling dinner, which was sub par, although I’m a little biased, as I think it was what provoked my illness. They had a bunch of different interesting dumplings, but I really can’t think about that right now ‘cause I might throw up again. Sorry!

Well, that was kind of a lame blog entry. Oh well, I’ll do better next time, I promise!