Xi'an City Wall and ping pong

Xi’an, the city we were just in, is surrounded by a wall. Without seeing it, you really can’t imagine how big this thing is. It extends around the city center for 17 km. It would have made for a really cool bike ride around the entire city, but we just did not have time for it. It looks a bit like the Atlantic City boardwalk when you are up on top of it, except it is a ton longer and it is raised about 30 or 40 feet in the air above the city. Here is a pic that may give you a bit of an idea what I am talking about.

 

 

We got to get a great view of it from the West Gate into the city, which remains 100% in tact the way it has been for centuries. The gate was actually the official start of the Silk Road from China through India and eventually into Europe centuries ago, which is very cool. Here is a pic of Kathy and I in front of the guard building on the West Gate.

 

 

Inside the guard building today is a gift shop that had some very nice art work in it. In a corner of the room, we saw a ping pong table amid all the fabulous works of art. I made the tremendous mistake of playing a bit with Xiao Fei. Ping Pong is the national sport of China and Xaio Fei had already told us he was really good at it. He’s a fabulous athlete, a championship runner and soccer player when he was in college. He just killed me at ping pong. I know I am not very good at it anyway, but he basically slammed back every ball I hit while laughing hysterically. It was fun and funny.

 

 

When w got done, I promptly challenged him to a game of basketball. He laughed and declined ;)

 

Another small victory at dinner

Recall that I mentioned a couple days ago that we had finally gotten past the issue of only getting one small glass of something to drink at meals? Well, we achieved another victory at a recent dinner… we actually got to eat Dim Sum!

 

Kathy had been asking about this for days. Frankly, every meal looked exactly like the one before it, with lots of heavy Chinese sauces and essentially the same dishes over and over again. Sometimes we would get Peking Duck or something slightly special, but even at those places, the rest of the meal was identical to all the others.

 

But, Kathy finally broke Xiao Fei down and he took us for Dim Sum in his native town of Xi’an.

 

Wow, was it good! Easily one of the top meals we have had. We just kept on popping these delicious little morsels into our mouths! It was really cool how they designed each Dim Sum to look a little bit like the food inside it. For example, here was the duck Dim Sum…

 

 

There was even a walnut one that came in a dough covering that looked identical to a walnut shell. AS an added bonus, some members of the wait staff had amazing Chinese outfits on. Here is what they looked like –

 

Terra Cotta Warriors

I knew what the Terra Cotta Warriors were. I knew we would be seeing thousands of them that had been buried for centuries and that they would all be lined up in this giant archeological pit. Intellectually, I was 100% prepared for what I would see. It should not have been any shock at all to me.

 

But it was…

 

 

The sheer scope of the excavation and the wave after wave of warriors are a wonder to behold. There are 3 buildings with excavations. The picture above is #1, which is by far the most impressive. Still, we could not help but also spend about a half-hour each in rooms #2 and #3.

 

The history of the warriors is an interesting one. They were built for Emperor Ching as an army he would have to use in the afterlife. Lisa Shepherd and I correctly figured out that the way they were built was by pouring mud into molds and then baking until the warrior was hard. But, the heads were done separately from the bodies by skilled artists who tried to design each head to be slightly different from all the rest.

 

 

Shortly after the army was built, the Emperor died and his son took over. The son was such a lousy emperor, the people revolted and overthrew his rule. When the peasants came across the warriors, they smashed most of them and burned the buildings housing the Terra Cotta Warriors to the ground. This picture of a horse shows how the pieces had to be painstakingly put back together before they could be put on display.

 

 

There was a flood, that buried all the pieces of the broken warriors and then, in the 1970s, a farmer found the head of one of them while digging for a well. The government stepped in and began the massive excavation that is truly one of the wonders of the world today.

Terra Cotta Farmer story

So, in my last post I was talking about the farmer who found the Terra Cotta warriors after they had been buried for thousands of years. After he told the government about finding a head of a warrior, archeologists moved in and found a lot more. The Chiense government then seized the farmer’s land and moved him somewhere else. Xiao Fei asked us how much money the man got as compensation for finding this incredible piece of history (which now generates millions of dollars a day in revenue for China).

 

Ready?

 

Two dollars and fifty cents.

 

$2.50!!!

 

Even Xiao Fei agreed that the farmer got ripped off. Xiao Fei then told us a really funny story about the farmer. Obviously, the farmer did not speak English. A few years ago, Bill Clinton was coming to visit the TC Warriors and Clinton said he wanted to meet the man who had discovered them. So, the TC museum folks got this farmer and thought it would be a nice surprise to Clinton if they taught him some English so he could speak with Clinton. They tried to just get him to memorize a few phrases that they figured would naturally happen in a short conversation. They envisioned it would go like this –

 

Farmer – “Hello, how are you?”

Clinton – (any response – probably “fine”)

Farmer – “Me too.”

 

What could go wrong?

 

Well, the farmer got nervous, so instead of saying “Hello, how are you?” he spoke with a poor accent and Clinton heard him say, “Hello, who are you?”

 

Clinton’s response… “I’m Hillary’s husband.”

 

To which the farmer, as instructed, replied, “Me too.”

 

That’s some funny stuff right there!

 

As we leave Terra Cotta land, here is a picture of 500 or so warriors about to bend over and moon me.

 

 

 

 

Wild Goose Pagoda

Xi’an is a lovely city, probably my favorite so far. We saw one of the real highlights of the city yesterday morning when we visited the Wild Goose Pagoda, a famous Buddhist shrine and one of the largest pagodas in the world. We heard a long story about its history from Xiao Fei. It was built some 1300 years ago by a monk who is credited with bringing Buddhism to China. The Emperor at the time, I want to say it was the Tang Dynasty, agreed to build it as a memorial to his dead wife. Here is a group shot of all of us standing in front of it.

 

 

We saw all kinds of magnificent Buddhist shrines surrounding the pagoda. It was quite peaceful. Many of the shrines were recently built, which gave them less historic charm but more polish and beauty. When we got to the bottom of the pagoda, we found out that you can walk up to the top. Most of the group did not want to bother, despite being assured that it was a far, far easier climb than the recent one we took to the top of the Potala Palace in Tibet. Still, 5 of us braved the 260+ steps to the top of this 7 story building – Lori, Lori, Ann, Kathy, and me. I got a pic of the ladies on the stairs about halfway up the climb.

 

 

It was quite beautiful at the top – great views all across the city of Xi’an. Here is my favorite shot –

 

 

Next stop, the Terra Cotta Warriors!

 

Note: Internet connection remains a huge problem, which is my posting is massively delayed at this point.

 

Little victories and Panda silk

Our final hours in Chengdu represented a real victory for us. The schedule called for us to go to some kind of “Water Park.” No, this was not a place with water slides and wave pools, it was going to be a demonstration of Chinese engineering and how they purify water and the such. Ummm, yawn! No one wanted to go.

 

In the past when we have tried to get Xiao Fei to make changes to the schedule, he has been pretty resistant. We can tell he wants to please us and work with us, but he has masters elsewhere who pay his salary and he needs to keep them happy too. Plus, folks in these Communist countries are used to following orders, not improvising and making changes on the fly.

 

Anyway, we wanted to go to the Chengdu Brochade museum instead of the water park. Brochade is a very complicated form of silk weaving using these gigantic looms that must be operated by 2 or 3 people at one time. It is an ancient art in China and people who knew about it said it was really cool. I don’t know how we convinced him, but Xiao Fei agreed to abandon the water park and go to the Brochade museum instead. Here is a picture of a Brochade weave of some pandas.

 

 

The texture and tightness of the weave is what really impressed me.

 

The museum demonstration of the looms and the art of Brochade went fairly quickly and it was very cool… but then we hit the gift shop and almost everyone on the trip put their plastic to work! We bought wall-hangings, scarves, wallets/pocketbooks, and all kinds of other stuff. It was just too beautiful to pass up. So, instead of spending the afternoon being bored at the water park, we contributed thousands of dollars to the Chinese economy ;)

 

Here is a picture of Kathy and Ann Wichman looking at some panda hangings. They were magnificent and we got one even though they were kinda pricey.

 

 

My next reports will be on the fabulous Xi’an Wild Goose Pagoda and the Terra Cotta warriors, which we saw today. It may be a day until I get those up as the internet in Xi’an has been terrible and my pictures are taking forever to go through. You simply must see the pictures from these two stops!

There will be NO PICTURES in this report

My friends at home, you do not know what you will miss until it is gone.

 

Please, I beg you, think of us here in China the next time you sit down on a toilet because you will be experiencing something that has become totally foreign to us.

 

For the most part, China is devoid of actual commodes. Instead, we get holes in the ground… often accompanied by a stench that is so pungent even someone with a bursting bladder cannot tolerate it long enough to get relief. Our days have become built around bathroom breaks at bathrooms that are tolerable to an American. We sometimes divert off-course to find a hotel or other establishment that has a public washroom the women on the trip can use (the guys, with our larger bladders and ability to pee standing up have not complained at all about the facilities).

 

You may wonder why I am writing about this, but I am completely serious when I say that this has, at times, been a major issue on the trip. We have gotten to the point where all bathroom facilities are rated on a 1 to 10 scale. Women often come back from a bathroom break announcing “it was a 3 or maybe a 4” so the other women can gauge whether to risk a squat. I am sad to report that there have been far more “2s” than “5s.” I don’t think we’ve seen anything higher than a 6 or 7 outside of our hotel rooms, that’s for sure.

 

In case any of you dare to wonder what a “2” could be, someone came out of a bathroom at a tourist place the other day and said, “DO NOT GO IN THERE! It is not even a hole in the ground, it is just a trench!” Actually, a trench is more like a 1.5

 

Xiao Fei told us a story about a woman on another tour who was using the facilities in one place that had a 60-foot hole that served as a toilet. The woman dropped her camera down into the hole. She went up to her guide and asked if there was any way to get it out. We all cracked up at that one. A little toilet humor is sometimes a good thing ;)