"You can order food, but it's a bloody nightmare..."

So, admittedly, in our first week of travel there, China hadn't exactly won our votes for our favourite travel destination thus far. However, the craziness of the Chinese people and the utter chaos in which they seem to each be floating around in, did start to feel more familiar and funny by week 2. We arrived in Xi'an, the great walled city, and set off to see it's major attraction: The Terracotta Warriors. This army of statues was uncovered in the 1970's and were all assembled to guard the tomb of the same dude who built the Great Wall. Not a bad resume, eh? The warriors were as impressive as I had hoped, with each one having a unique facial expression and outfit. There are estimated to be over 8000 warriors, although, to our surprise, a vast number of these have yet to be excavated. Also, the tomb of aforementioned impressive resume dude (I think his name was Emperor Quin?) was nearby, but apparently scientists still cannot figure out a way to open the tomb without destroying the artifacts inside... I was pretty shocked that we still can't manage that in 2009! As I walked into the first area that housed the majority of the warriors, I wasn't sure what I was really expecting to see, but what I wasn't expecting was that they would be housed in what could only be described as a massive airplane hangar. I was quite a bizarre backdrop to the statues! We wandered around the site for a while while our tour guide, Puma, who is from Xi'an and was a local guide there for years, just left us with basically no information. As Mars lamented this over the phone to Uncle Jim, we were happy to hear that we weren't alone in our experience. As he so eloquently put it: "Yeah, our Chinese guide was useless too!" haha. On our way out of the warrior complex, like the good tourists we are, we stopped to have some funny photos taken and then eat some noodles and Subway sandwiches.

Speaking of food, we still didn't encounter anyone who spoke even reasonable English in a restaurant (except Starbucks... god love globalization). So, Mars and I, along with a fun English couple, decided to venture into the unknown - a Chinese cafeteria. The staff tried to direct us to the top floor of the restaurant, where there was an English menu and the food was triple the price. We declined, and wandered in to see if we could get some of the noodle soup that Xi'an was known for. After wandering around the food stations looking bewildered, we found our saviour, our oasis, our ticket to actually getting food.... a table in the middle of the restaurant that had white people eating aound it!!! Unashamed and uninhibited by the British compulsion to avoid random conversations with strangers, we walked right up to them and asked how they managed to get food. The guy, who was there with his parents and Chinese girlfriend, looked at us like he was expecting this question from the moment we walked in. He deadpanned: "You can order food here, but it's a bloody nightmare." You had to buy a pre-paid card, then order cold food, soup, and warm food from separate stations, then hunt down the drink cart lady and persuade her to perhaps give you a drink from the cart. The process from putting the money on the card, to pointing to the same dish 100 times and receiving blank stares, to finally receiving some but not all of the food we ordered, took about an hour. But we were damn proud to have made it that far! The next night, Mars and I went to a place that only served dumplings, hence the massive golden dumpling in the foyer. The dumplings were fantastic, but about 30 seconds before this photo was taken I fell over the edge of the stairs that the big dumpling was sitting on... I recovered quickly, but I'm sure the staff will be telling that story for a while :)

In keeping with my massage tour of the world, I went to a traditional Chinese massage place to see what they had to offer. I shouldn't have been surprised when the guy who was giving the massage worked on me in exactly the same way as the Chinese walk and drive: with no sense of pace, direction, or rhythm. That experience alone was enough to make me understand why Phoebe absolutely refuses to date Asian men!! We also wandered through the Great Mosque, the largest in China. We especially enjoyed the experience because we walked the complex with Samir, the cute, if slightly overwhelmed, 70 year old (!) Muslim man that was in our tour group. (I think maybe his travel agent didn't really explain the Intrepid style of travel to him... he was inly used to 5-star hotels!) We finished off our time in Xi'an by wandering the streets in search of souvenirs and taking in a really cool water show near the Big Goose Pagoda.

Next it was off to Beijing, via another overnight train. At the station one of the train workers was hollering at everyone through a portable loud speaker... he would yell at us with it while we were standing literally right beside him. We thought it was so funny that we got his to pose for a photo with us! The train we took was extra special... each cabin contained 6 beds and no door. No need to set an alarm to get up on this train. At the crack of dawn, as sure as the sun rises in the East, we awoke to the ever present sound that surrounds your every waking moment on the streets on China: full phlegm, deep guttural, give-it-all-the-snot-you-can-muster horking. Men, and women, took turns spending a good 10 minutes each at the train sink making the worst possible sound that you could ever imagine waking up to. Ah, the joys of budget travel with the masses!! haha.