Xi’an is famous for the Terra Cotta Warriors, which is where we headed on Wednesday. My navigating put us on the wrong side of the tracks, literally, at the railway station to catch the bus. The 20 minute walking detour turned out to be interesting, through first the bicycle/moped repair district (shop after shop after shop of parts) and then the LED sign district. As we’ve mentioned before, everything in China is huge, so while it sounds simple to go to the train station and catch a bus, the train station is massive, making it very difficult to actually find the bus stop. We were ushered onto a bus by a pushy bus attendant before having time to figure out the number of the bus. Turns out it would have gotten us to the warriors eventually, but was a local that made lots of stops. Regardless, we didn’t know the number of the bus we had boarded, so we got off the first bus at a later stop and onto another bus we were certain would get us there. The man sitting next to me on the second bus tried to give me 1 yuan; I have absolutely no idea why.

The Terra Cotta Warriors were very impressive. The underground army was built as Emperor Qin’s mausoleum, around 200 BC. The statues themselves were much larger than I expected, life size of a large man. There are currently three pits open for viewing; the third houses the high ranking officers, the second consists of military forces including archers, war chariots, cavalrymen, and infantrymen, and the first, and most impressive, contains the main army. There is still a lot of work being done excavating the area.
            

Along the drive were orchards after orchards of pomegranate trees, with stand after stand of people selling just pomegranates. All the trees had plastic bags around the pomegranates, no idea why, have not had a chance to Google that one yet. I did buy a pomegranate, and it was good. They are always a lot of work for little reward. And what do they do with all those pomegranates? It seems like way to many just to eat. Hard to tell, but here’s a picture of small individual plastic bags over each pomegranate in the orchard.

For dinner we stopped at a restaurant back in Xi’an that advertised ‘welcomes foreigners’, but no one spoke any English. The only reason I mention dinner at all is because Ryan was putting rice on his plate from a bowl, and one of the waitresses decided he wasn’t doing it right, or was doing it too slowly, and came over with chopsticks and scooped rice on his plate for him. Between that and the man offering me money on the bus, it was an entertaining day.

Back at the hostel, we joined the dumpling making party along with a guy from Australia and two sisters from Sweden. Mikki from the hostel taught us how to make the dumplings, rolling the dough, stuffing (veggie ones with egg, chives, and spices for this evening), and then boiling in water. They were pretty delicious, and something easy enough to make at home. Maybe we will start an annual dumpling making party to celebrate Chinese New Year?
     

Side note: We figured out that the relatively horrid smell in Beijing was actually stinky tofu, a common street food! And boy does it stink.