Xi'an

Throughout my trip, I've been keeping a journal, a paper record of my travels in a book my sister gave me, one peppered with quotations like "The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it" and "Not all that wander are lost." At first, it was a daily journal, and before long, an every-few-days thing, but at the time of this entry--mid November--I'd neglected my journal writing duties rather fully, completely lost track of the date, and couldn't account for an entire day. After that, I vowed to make it a daily ritual, and have since kept up with it about twice a week. So, if anything seems askew, any details misaligned, then this is probably why. That, and I've also had three beers.

We arrived in Xi'an in the early afternoon, the sun blurred behind a heavy dome of haze. Immediately outside the train station, we were struck by the sight of the ancient city wall, a feature that lent Xi'an a quality of character which most Chinese cities lack. The following day, we would ride around the wall on rented bicycles, circumnavigating the old city. But that first day, we visited the Wild Goose Pagoda (or, more accurately, enjoyed it from a distance), got turned away from a history museum (closed by 4?), walked through a football field-sized fountain, and wandered the streets of the Muslim Quarter.

Later that evening, back at our hostel, I was roped into a drunken conversation with a trio of Brits. I'd been seeking a beer and a few quiet hours to write, but was instead bombarded by personal questions, rants, and wild theories that were progressively more difficult to understand. These guys weren't guests, they weren't even travelers (the oldest of them had lived there 9 years), they were merely sitting in the tiny lobby of this run-down hostel, drinking the 5 yuan beer. The youngest of them seemed like a reasonable fellow--the one among them with which I could have a real conversation--but he was unfortunately overpowered by the two older, louder, more bitter and sarcastic men, and hardly got a word in edgewise. Sometime after the third round, the conversation deteriorated to truly toxic levels, and I bid them goodnight.

After our morning bike ride, we caught a bus to the site of the Terra Cotta Warriors, the primary reason we'd stopped in Xi'an. Following a great deal of confusion and backtracking to get our entry tickets (despite the place being visited by hundreds of foreign tourists a day, there was no English signage indicating where to buy tickets, a place we found, finally, a good kilometer from the entrance gate) we eventually got in. The first few buildings we entered ranged from the disappointing (a sparse collection of artifacts, some of questionable authenticity) to the truly bizarre (a giant Terra Cotta Warrior marionette hanging from the ceiling, holding hands with a little girl).

But eventually, we found the real deal--Pit 1--the stadium-sized enclosure housing over 7000 figures: infantry, cavalry, archers, charioteers and generals, every one unique down to its hairstyle and sculpted in a detail that defies accurate description. In one pit, we watched as archaeologists excavated new figures right before our eyes, scooping soil out of a torso, and producing a leg that nobody had seen in over 2000 years. It was like the world's biggest jigsaw puzzle, only all the pieces were broken, buried, and extremely fragile. Complete excavation and reassembly will take decades. The Terra Cotta Warriors completely blew us away.