City of Western Peace?

Over the weekend we went to Xi'an. Started with a day off, during which I slept in, and then went back to Kiev for some delicious Russian food and Ukrainian opera-singing. Took Garry to Houhai, where we were immediately accosted at every turn by rickshaw drivers wanting to give us tours of the hutong. Finally, we caved, agreeing to pay Y60/each for a 1 hour drive around the hutong. It turned out to be pretty interesting, but we didn't really get to go inside any of the notable sites like Prince Gong's Residence.

Wandered for a bit around Yandai Xiejie, poking into some pretty interesting shops selling stuff from Tibet, Yunnan, and other minority provinces. Caught a cab home, then packed frantically to catch the 9:36 train to Xi'an.

We went with the hard sleeper. Anyone who owns a Lonely Planet guidebook probably knows about the 4 classes of train seats in China. The hard sleeper is probably the ideal, and I found it a really pleasant way to travel, even if it was an 11-hour journey. You get a bed shelf with pillow and blanket, and you basically just sleep the whole way, and when you get up in the morning, you've arrived. It was reasonably comfortable, not too crowded.

We got picked up at the train station by a nice girl who spoke decent English and took us to Ludao Binguan, the hostel I'd chosen from Lonely Planet's glowing recommendation (Y188/night for a standard room). It was clean but definitely not fancy - no bathtub even, just a shower head attached to the wall, so you basically just showered in the bathroom. Weird.

We took our time getting breakfast at a mediocre dimsum place, then caught bus #306 (Y16 roundtrip, lots better than the USD$50 they charge on organized tours) to the Huaqing Hot Springs and the Bingmayo, or Terra Cotta Warriors. The hot springs is really a palace build around a bunch of hot springs. It's as lavish as the Summer Palace in Beijing, but perhaps more beautiful because the old architecture looks more authentic (as in, has not been "renovated" and painted garish colors):

For Y1 we got to feel the hot springs for ourselves at these fountains:

PG-13 statue of some well-endowed Chinese concubines (something you def. don't see every day):

One of the springs backed by mist-shrouded mountains:

We then hopped another buss to the Terra Cotta Warriors, the highlight of any Xi'an trip. They were, in a word, awesome. We went a bit backwards in viewing them, but I thought it was the best order: Pit #2, then Pit #3, then Pit #1, the grandest of them all. It started with just the excavation site, where all we could see was pit after pit of broken statues, some recognizable, others just shards of pottery. It was awe-inspiring but more than once I thought it looked creepily like a mass grave:

Pit #3 is quite smaller than the other two, and almost courtly in its layout and feel. I thought it was funny how they left some of the warriors headless, all lined up in neat rows:

Finally, Pit #1, which most people see first, and even then we went in the exit, so we literally saw everything backwards. It was a gigantic building, as big as a hangar, full of terra cotta warriors in full battle formation. Quite the exhilarating sight.

The day was cold and miserably rainy, so after these two sights we decided to go home and turn in early. It would have been a fine day though, except as I walked past the train station in the cold, wet night, I felt something behind me, and whirled around to catch a thief (a kid really, probably 13 or 14 years old), who had unlatched my knapsack and was in the process of taking my wallet! I couldn't believe it, I was so shocked, and all I managed to do was yell, "What are you doing!?" as if he would really understand me. He just looked at me and walked away. Of course I wanted to yell at him in Chinese but my vocabulary failed me.

Oh well, at least he didn't get to any of my valuables (incl. my wallet, phone, and SLR camera!).