My preconcieved thought of how China would be were finally confirmed in Xi'an. It was a hussle bustle town which old school chinese architecture and shops which Beijing didnt really offer being a newer city. I had always thought of Xi'an as a small little town with the warriors just outside of the city but you would now compare it to somewhere like Perth of Adelaide smaller than the main cities but still very popular. The city however was like a fortress with an outer wall enclosing the city with only a handful of entry and exit points along the walls. These wall were 20-30m high and very thick obviously for protection in the earlier times.
We got off the train and waited for our hostel driver to come and pick us up, we waited and waited some more before we realised they wernt coming. We ended up waking to Maccas and tried to get some Wifi because my so called world traveler friend had not only forgotten where the hostel is but what its name was, so we couldnt even attempt to pronounce it to a taxi driver. We hailed a taxi hopped in and just told him to take us to any hostel he knew of and we would go from there. This small bit of information was difficult for him so he pulled out his mobile and called someone, then passed the phone to el. It ended up being his son who could speak broken english and we eventually found the hostel.
Once we got to the hostel we questioned them about the lack of transport from the train station, which we got an apology and the offer of 2 free coffies as a piece keeping. The coffees sucked by the way. MId morning we decieded to catch the bus out to the Terracotta Warriors, we had to catch the bus from the south wall where we were staying to the north, this was an eye opening experience as the busses ont really stop to let people on and off they contunially roll. We have joked a fair bit about the OH&S that is non existant in the China.
The warriors were about 40min out of Xi'an and rivalled the Summer palace as the best site seeing destination so far. We walked around the complex unconsciously seeing all the crap ones before we saw the hanger with the thousands of warriors. It was simply mind blowing. Seeing thousands of human sized terracotta casts all facing in the one direction excepts for the flank rows. Each warrior was different so it wasnt like looking at the same one that has been copied. Not only were their humans but also life size horse casts and chariots. It was ridiculous the scale of the whole exhibition. We were told and later saw that they are still uncovering all the warriors, they were found in 1974 buy a farmer digging a well in a paddock, that farmer was their signing books for the hoarding chinese population. So its already been nearly 40 years of uncovering the warriors and they still havnt finished, so this is definately a place you could re-visit in 20 years because it would have all changed again. I couldnt resist myself and bought a miniture archer warrior, it had to be done.
That night we went back to the hostel and made friends with what we think is african royalty because all these group of friends were filthy rich and studying electrical engineering in chinese. We had few drinks in the bar, bit of foose ball and beer pong.
The next day we flew to Shanghai
