Xi'an and Beijing

Its been a little while since our last post so this one has got a fair bit of catching up to do. Fortunately our latest hostel has a good wireless connection in a nice bar/cafe bit so we are relaxing nicely after another big day and getting an update in.

Our last update was just before we went on the terracotta army; we'd arranged the day trip out through the hostel where we were staying in the centre of Xi'an. These trips have been a pretty good way of meeting other travelers, and our tour guide turned out to be a crazy Chinese girl called Za Za. It was just like a school trip - we had to introduce ourselves and say where we were from, and then she went round a hit us all with stereotypes of each country which was a fairly strange start to the day.

In hindsight the whole day was a bit backwards - the first stop was at a "factory" where they sold overpriced knockoffs to the tourists. One thing they did was take a load of photos of you and build a life size terracotta army model of you; they had a few in their back room waiting to be shipped and it was really weird seeing western features on the ancient Chinese soldiers bodies. It was definitely odd seeing the fakes before we saw the real thing, and also they had so many pictures there it was almost like we didn't want to look too much in fear of spoiling it later on.

From there it was a short journey back in the bus to the tourist complex outside the main site. By this stage the heat and humidity switch had been dialed right up to 11, and we had to face a 1km trek from the bus to the entrance. Needless to say everyone was a sweaty mess by the time we hit the waves of security gates needed to get into the main area. In classic backwards fashion our guide preceded to take us around everything in reverse order of impressiveness... I'm sure she thought this was a good idea at the time but after seeing some fairly unimpressive bits that hadn't been dug out yet (and a truly awful 360 degree film that looks like it was shot in the 70s) we finally made it to the main building number 1.



It was packed out with thousands of sweaty people, but we managed to jostle to the front (handy being a clear foot taller than everyone else...) and get some pictures of the main chunk of soldiers. Some people report feeling underwhelmed by the whole thing, and from our experience you can kind of see what they mean... but we loved witnessing the results of the amazingly wacky concept of burying 8,000+ pottery soldiers underground to try and take them to heaven with you. I was surprised they'd stopped really trying to dig out any more of the site - I took a fair bit of imagination to appreciate the real epic-ness of it when two-thirds of the site was just rock underneath huge aircraft hangers. Maybe they should send the worlds trainee archeologists over year as part of their training, even with China's mind blowing human resources they think it would still take hundreds of years to extract everything there.

Our tour didn't go to the other tombs nearby - as well as burying the soldiers the emperor Qin Shi Huang also built an gigantic underground city nearby, and legend has it that it had rivers of liquid mercury flowing through it. This is the reason they give for not excavating further - the mercury levels in the ground make it dangerous to work there. I reckon if Time Team got in on the action, they'd have it up in no time, but I can't see that happening soon.

The next day we stayed in central Xi'an, and took the guide books advice about exploring the city walls on two wheels.



This was a load of fun, it was about 14km around the circumference and they gave you just about enough time to pedal around it like a lunatic before the extra time fees started clocking up. The bad news was that we'd started taking liberties with the sun cream, and both got burnt to a crisp. There are some lovely photos of my gloriously red neck, and secret agent style white sunglasses marks but we wont be posting those... Alex managed to escape serious embarrassment sadly bah!

That night we went to see a show that had been pitched to us in the hostel and recommended online. It was called the Tang Dynasty Show or something similar, and it was one of the wackiest/most hilarous things we'd ever seen. There were about 10 scenes of traditional dance and music, linked together by a crazy shouting Emperor character. The standout was a crazy trumpet chap - he was playing this really small trumpet that sounded a lot like a kazoo, and he just went crazy. Halfway through it took the trumpet out of his mouth and just kept going (for those that saw the last series of Britian's Got Talent, think of that crazy Sax guy) making the strangest noises you have ever heard. Well you have to try everything once...

Later that night we revisited some of the sights we'd seen during the day and got some nice night time pictures of the centre of Xi'an:



(I was hiding from the camera for a good few days...)

That was about it for Xi'an, so we booked our train tickets (overnight soft sleeper again) to Beijing. During the change over days we checkout in the morning, leave our bags at the hostel and try and do relaxing things that wont make us too hot or sweaty - this time we thought we'd try and get a nice back massage. The rough guide tipped us off about a massage centre staffed by blind masseuses, which sounded like a good thing to try... but ooooh how wrong can you go. These guys were professional torturers, and they met our cries of pain with laughter and even more gusto. Coming from the nice "massage with oil" school of relaxing massage back in the UK, this crazy pressure point Shiatsu wasn't really what we'd bargained for:



We hit the train with a lot more pain than we started the day with, but hopefully there were other therapeutic benefits too =)

Ok onto Beijing - the train was brilliant as usual, although being woken up at 7am and stumbling off the train straight into Beijing was pretty disorienting. We found our hostel after dealing with the standard shouty taxi driver, and went straight back to sleep! That afternoon we walked to Tiananmen Square (fairly bleak concrete jungle, reminded me of Coventry) and then on to an area with a good choice of bars for a drink. We quickly learned the first lesson of Beijing: dont try and walk anywhere. This place is huge... the map scale was 4km per few centimeters, so something that looked just around the corner was in fact miles away.

The next day was boiling hot again, but we soldiered on and visited the Forbidden City, home of Chinese emperors over the years. This picture was taken just outside:



This was another amazing place, again delivering on the distinctly Chinese ability to come up with sites on a scale that we'd never seen before. There were so many buildings and corridors and courtyards we quickly got lost, but it was really good fun exploring without a map. Both of us realised we were getting a little bit jaded from the amount of sightseeing we'd done (we really really need a beach soon!) so we didn't spend much time on the exhibitions.

Another running theme on China is hit and miss meals - many of the restaurants don't have English menus, pictures or staff that speak any English at all. So quite often a picture menu is a good as it gets, and we've found its surprisingly tough to pick tasty good based on a picture! I tend to do worse out of this than Alex; she tends to stick to tasty veggie options whilst I'm valiantly determined to go for meat dishes. This particular night was the crowning glory of bad choices :



In the picture it looked like a tasty chicken with chili dish, but when it emerged it turned out to be a beast... whole chillies, mixed with chopped chillies, whole cloves of garlic and bits of chicken bones and gristle. Bonus. I'm sorry to say I had to have a cheeky KFC for desert, it was that bad.

Right I'm going on quite a bit today so time to speed up a bit. We saw a really really good acrobatics show that night, well worth seeing if you are in Beijing.



Next big thing - the Great Wall. We signed up for another hostel trip so we joined 20 or so other travelers and jumped into the (nicely air conned) bus to the section of the wall at Mutianyu.



We did about 3 hours walking along the stretch of wall, which was amazing. This is one thing that really did live up to expectations and more... the scenery was breathtaking (or was that walking up and down steep hills in the sunshine? =), sorry couldn't resist..) and yet again the scale of it all really gets your imagination going - apparently 1/5 of the entire population of China helped build the thing. It was the same wacky Emperor that was responsible for the terracotta army who had a hand in this, by this point he was so mad from the mercury he probably though it was a reasonable thing to try and build...



They had a really fun bobsleigh effort on the way down which I really couldn't resist, it was good fun even if we were shouted at AGAIN... our speed was considered TOOO FAAAAAST and we definitely weren't supposed to be taking any photos. Heaven forbid!



And the award for longest post ever goes to... time to call it a night. Tomorrow we are mostly going to be chilling out, and maybe checking out the Olympic swimming pool if our legs haven't seized up completely!