Day 5 in Xian

Today we arrived in Xian at 8:30 am. I was pretty groggy from the train and not looking forward to carting my bags through the station and to our new tour bus. Thankfully the station wasn’t nearly as hectic as the one in Beijing- outside was another story. When we left the train station there were hundreds of people waiting around the doorway for arriving passengers- all looking pretty impoverished and dirty. We had to push our way through the crowd of people – it was really scary. We got to a white truck and loaded up all of our luggage … I was afraid I was never going to see my stuff again! After our luggage was packed in we walked about a quarter of a mile up the street to our tour bus. The air was thick and smoggy, even more so than Beijing. The area was dirty and filled with trash…we passed multiple people going to the bathroom on the side of the street- such a change from Beijing.

When we got to our bus we met our tour guide for the day- Key. He gave us a brief history of Xian and told us about the old city wall, 9 miles in diameter. It’s the largest, oldest one still intact in China. We checked into our hotel (The Hyatt!) and it was really nice. We all quickly showered and then headed on our way to the Terracotta Warrior excavation site. On our way there we stopped at a factory that creates authentic warriors. I got an archer (guy kneeling – he was my favorite).

We got to the excavation site and it was amazing. I can’t believe that these thousands of terracotta warriors were discovered in 1974 by a few farmers – and that tons were still intact. It was an amazing discovery because it revealed a lot about the advancement and skill of early Chinese sculpture as well as the use of helmets in war. Amazingly, the creation of the warriors to protect the emperors tomb (which took something like 4 decades) was never written about anywhere in Chinese history. We spent a while walking around the 3 pits of warriors. I was surprised at how cold they had to keep the excavation sites, I guess it is because any artificial temperature control would ruin the artifacts.

After we were finished there, the planned day was pretty much done and we had free time. A bunch of us jumped at the chance to get some American food at the hotel restaurant. I was so excited to have some margarita pizza and a Caesar Salad. Wasn’t the same as home, but still good. After dinner we hung out and then did some walking around to a few local shops. Our hotel was in a really central location so it was fun. I crashed at around 10 because I was so beat from the past few days.