Well i arrived in Xi'an early and got checked into the hotel. The overnite train was grand...the hard sleepers werent as bad as i thought all good craic!
Xi'an is a lovely wee city...i reminds me a bit like Londonderry with its walls around the city. I hired a bike a cycled around the walls, was a good couple of hours, but gave a nice view of the city. Just walked about the place and visited some Mosques....some of them were pretty stunning.
Went to the Dried Fruit market it was brilliant...the dried mango was the nicest so got meself a big bag of it to munch on was so yum! They had every fruit that you could imagine, it was impressive. Had a walk around the Muslim Quarter, they had loadsa food stalls, and other random nic nacs...half of the stuff i hadnt a clue what it was but was interestin to see.
We all headed out to a bar that nite it was good craic. Three of the bar managers wanted to have drinks with us but they couldnt speak a word of English...it was so funny. One fella who was their friend started karoke and started to dedicate songs to us...worst was he hadnt a note in his head and we hard to sit for over an hour listenin til him tryin to sing! I could stop laughin...tried me best but just couldnt! Was a good nites craic.
Next day we headed off to see the Terracotta Warriors...i was so excited. There were 3 pits altogether, the first one being the biggest. They were so cool...all these little men statues lined up in rows with each one completely different...there was also statues of horses and carts too. They had no colour but when they were first dug up they did but it evaporated as soon as the oxygen hits it. They have stopped digging in pit 3 until they find a way of perseving the colour on the ones left to dig up.
One thing that i didnt expect was to find out that all the warriors were smashed to pieces by the allies of the emperior...so every warrior there had been pieced and glued together by the geologists....except for 3 that remained in perfect condition. The 2nd pit had more warriors...these were to protect the 1st pit and were positioned a different way to the first. Pit 3 had only a few warriors dug up and the rest were being perserved.
The whole thing was amazing...i just found it weird how one emperior could have so much power. If any one of the craftsmen made a mistake sculpting the warriors they were killed! When the emperior died, all the people that were involved in the tomb and warrior creation were all buried alive! The emperior ordered this to happen so that the secret passages werent leaked out!
The tomb of the emperior still hasnt been extracted because there is Mercury all around it and they are unsure how to deal with it. You just see the big mound that his tomb sits under. The warriors were brilliant, i loved them!
The next day i headed off to see more warriors but this time they were wee small ones. They were so cool! They had no arms, because they were wooden and had rotted away and also naked. There were robes on them when they first got buried but again these decayed. There was also mini figures of sheep, goats, hens, pigs, horses, and pottery. They were surrounding the tomb of Emperior Jingdi and these were all his possessions and protection for his burial tomb. They were really impressive.
I left Xi'an on the 17th Oct evening and caught the hard sleeper train to Shanghai. Lights go out at 10pm on the train so we all had to have an early one. That was me on my way to Shanghai!
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