Terracotta Warrors VS Hype

"The Eighth Wonder Of The World!" That's the claim, at least, about the terracotta warriors. I went to see for myself. It was a miserable rainy day in Xi'an, and the bus ride out of the city took about an hour.

I wasn't even sure if I wanted to go see them. Another case of The Dread. I even checked reviews and thoughts of people online and everyone was soaking their pants about how stunning and "worth it" it was. I decided to blow the 110 yuan it takes to get in. That's a small fortune in China, about $17.

The experience starts with a kilometer-long walk through a gauntlet of tourist shops selling obligatory warrior statues, stamps, carvable name seals, postcard, knickknacks, and all sorts of predictable souvenir crap, right down to porcelain figurines of German Shepards. Don't ask me why.

All the shops are in a western-style outdoor mall. There's even a Terracotta Warriors KFC and Subway. It was a real travesty, and to make matters worse, when I got to the gate finally, I was told the ticket office was back down towards the start. "By KFC".

Fortunately there was a ticket hawker who inexplicably gave me one for face value after I refused to pay extra, though he kept asking for a tip, which I probably would've given him if I wasn't already so disenchanted with getting hassled for being a foreigner throughout Asia. He was standing around in the rain, saving me a twenty minute round trip, after all.

So I saw the terracotta warriors, and learned a bit about their history: commissioned by a 13 year old king so he'd have some friends when he died, rank discernable by size and decoration, blah, blah, blah. Just google it if that's what you're really interested in.

The statues are in three pits of varying sizes. The big one, pit A, the medium one, pit B, and the small one, pit C. After being thwarted by horrible sign postings, I went the recommended path, C to B to A, building up for the grand finale.

Sure, the size of the crumbling army is impressive, but who doesn't know that already? Who hasn't seen photos of the cavernous pit A, or close-ups of the faces, or heard that all of the faces are different? Tourists walk around the pit perimeters, looking down into them from a distance. Many warriors are lined up in battle formation, but most are still yet to be excavated, and many others are being patched together, to be ready for presentation.

What I did learn was how superior Chinese civilization of 2,200 years ago was to modern day western civilization: "Some of the unearthed brass weapons bore chrome-plated edges. This technology was discovered by America and Germany in the 1930s, but it was already mastered in China of 2,200 years ago! How impressive!"

Pit B still had a lot of unexcavated statues. They were under the original covering: thatched mats laid over wooden beams, resting on packed earthen walls. The soldiers stand in the corridors between the walls. Like I said, most of the roofing was still up, making the pit look like a field of petrified blankets thrown over wooden ribs.

I'm glad I went just because I would still be wondering if I missed out on anything had I skipped it. But I would recommend anyone else against going, unless you are going for one of the following reasons:

1. you (or your travel companions) have never heard of the "Eighth Wonder Of The World" somehow
2. you really need to see with your own eyes the scale of the pits (one thing that no photos or documentaries can really give you) and appreciate the feeling of space
   
3. unlike me, you're not a dirty traveler burnt out on tourist traps

Xi'an

Xi'an is the end, or the beginning, of the Silk Road. If I had given that any thought I probably would have been more excited to be there. But I arrived to a city of cold, unrelenting, soft rain. The train station spit me out into a crowd of people milling about the city wall.

I trudged through the rain to find a hostel I checked out online. These two things would be the theme of my brief visit to Xi'an: trudging around the city, and cold rain.

I stayed in the 7 Sages Hostel. It's in a beautiful complex of traditional Chinese row houses. There are circular doorways, and clean white-washed walls and gray paving stones. Sadly, because of the dreary, miserable weather, the courtyards and open spaces were unenjoyable.

I heard so many good things about Xi'an when I was passing through China last year. But arriving there, I wasn't very impressed. But to be fair, I didn't really try to explore much. I learned, too late, that it's possible to rent a bicycle on top of the mammoth wall that encircles central Xi'an and spend a couple hours cycling around. I learned, too late, that it has some pretty lively nightlife. I spent my nights at the hostel, in the near-empty bar/restaurant butchering songs on my guitar.

What I did do was slog through the gutters and poke around the train station until I found the tourist bus to the terracotta warriors. Later, I slogged right back to the train station to wait in line to buy an onward ticket to Urumqi, just to be told there was nothing available.

Also, I slogged through the rain to an outlying bus station to pick up tickets to Xin Jiang, a small city I was told doesn't exist by a woman at the local bus station and two people at my hostel. My friends living in the city would be upset to hear their home doesn't exist.

The problem was that people thought I was looking for a bus to Xin Jiang province. No one even heard of the small city - different, obscure characters made it's name, and it's a place so inconsequential that there is no reason to hear of it. I guess I don't blame them. I finally got a ticket to visit my friends for two days.

I also slogged through the rain to hunt down a smaller train ticket office, armed with a piece of paper explaining what I needed in Chinese. I thought there had been some sort of mistake at the station when the clerk told me he couldn't give me what I wanted.

I was willing to try alternate trains and times, but I was to discover, quite clearly after having a hostel staff member translate for me on my cell, that on the 9 trains per day that go from Xi'an to Urumqi, there wasn't a single bed for ten days.

That's 90 trains without a goddamn bed. I wasn't willing to get up first thing the next morning just for the chance to book a bed ten days later. I wanted to get the fuck out of China. All the people on the train to Beijing, my wasted days in the capital, the hordes of humans everywhere, and now this: no beds or even seats to Urumqi, the farthest city in the world from an ocean, literally the middle of nowhere. It was all getting to me.

I figured I'd get it over with. I booked a standing seat in hard class. Another 40 hour ride in a steel tube of sweating humanity. The sooner I was to get out of China, the better.