track our trek

since we found ourselves with some extra time to kill in china, we decided to head to xi'an and see the army of terra cotta soldiers after all. we got a couple of one way tickets through a hostel in shanghai. (just walk into any youth hostel, and there's usually a person who can help you book cheap tickets)...we thought the air was bad in beijing!!! when we landed in xi'an, we both thought something was burning, like maybe there was something wrong with one of the planes nearby....when we got out of our taxi 45 minutes later, the air was the same! at 8pm it looked like we were driving through a heavy fog! we decided pretty quickly we wouldn't be hanging around there long!  we settled into our hotel and took a walk to check out xi'an's nightlife...we got sucked into a club when we heard a nice beat from the street, only to discover there was no one inside but the bar staff and a band who were having a few beers...they were so excited to see us, they jumped up on stage and started crooning a bunch of chinese pop tunes just for us! hilarious...in the morning we woke up to a wet rainy day...but we trudged out in search of a tour group to join anyway...we had no luck that day, but managed to find a cits office and book a tour to the terra cotta soldiers and wild goose pagoda for tuesday and cheap tickets to bangkok for wednesday.
tuesday proved to be a bright sunny day, in spite of a grim forecast...the history behind the terra cotta army is really fascinating...some 3000 years ago, emperor so and so ordered an army of 5000 soldiers built to be buried with him so he could continue his reign in the afterlife...unfortunately, the site is all hyped up and commercialized, so there's a lot of build up, with not much reward at the end. there is one pit that is well excavated where you can see the soldiers lined up, but the others are unexcavated, so you just look at an empty pit..."it's estimated that this pit contains 1500 soldiers..." of course on the way we visited the terra cotta warrior factory & were given ample time to be hounded about buying life-size replicas & having them packaged and shipped...can you imagine?...we met jim and ann, a couple from louisville kentucky, on our tour & had a good time walking around the moslem quarters with them for a couple of hours in search of dinner. we decided to try a mongolian hot pot place that was packed & had an english menu (remember the rules of thumb.) the food was quite tasty & a decent deal even after our waiter took us for a tip...(there's no tipping in china, mind you, but he saw us coming & decided to squeeze all he could out of us)...