9 miles in 95° heat!

So it seemed like a really good idea to plan a family bike ride along the Xian city walls.  After all, we loved our family bike tour in Barcelona last year.

Alas, it was a lot hotter in Xian.  And sunnier.  And more humid.  And it was a 9 mile ride, on really crappy bikes dating from the Mao era...

But we persevered and still had a good, albeit slightly sunburned, time.

The wall is an immense structure surrounding the inner city of Xian, originally built in the Ming Dynasty (13th century) and stands about 40 feet tall and about 35 feet wide.  It's been repaved a few times (and a marathon is run on it later in the year) so it was only moderately bumpy!

Some of the gate towers on the wall have been beautifully restored.

And we saw some leftover lanterns from last year's Mid-Autumn Festival that made for a fun section of the wall to ride on.

Anders, our trusty Swede, told us that Westerners can typically get all the way around the wall in about 45-50 mins while the Chinese take a more leisurely pace and take closer to 90 mins.  Which do you think we were?!

Tablets and Mosques

 After a lovely lunch, we headed to the Forest of Stone Tablets Museum where thousands of etched stone tablets were displayed.  A large room of 20+ tablets represented a book - the tablets were created so students could study for their main tests by making paper rubbings of the tablets, which would ensure consistency before the advent of printing.  Rubbings were still being made and you could purchase them as souvenirs.

After the tour, we stopped for an hour long calligraphy lesson with a master who has been practicing his calligraphy skills for over 40 years.  We had a lot of fun and I remember far more of my elementary mandarin than I thought I would!

I thought this gate was simply beautiful.

Later, we visited one of the largest mosques in China - it was unique because it was built in the architectural style of a Chinese temple.  Instead of a minaret, there was a pagoda!

A shot of the arabic writing over the Chinese gate to continue the incongruity.

Terracotta Highlights

We headed off bright and early the next morning for the Terracotta Warriors, with our new local guide, Jessica and our new driver leading the way.  Our little van had a special pass so we could drive almost all the way up to the main entrance - in contrast to the tour buses and other transportation that had to park about half a mile away and brave a gauntlet of souvenir vendors on their way to the main gate.  Have I mentioned how much I enjoy the perks of a private tour?!

Walking into the main room of Pit 1 was breathtaking.  There were multiple burial pits with scores of warriors lined up in rows.  We learned that there were an estimated 8,000 warriors in the 3 pits they've excavated so far, with about 2,000 of them having been reassembled.  Yes, they found a jumbled mass of body parts and every single warrior had to be painstakingly put back together and lined up for display.  That's why many warriors are incomplete - missing heads, arms etc.  But each face and body was very distinctive - there are serious looking warriors, more mischievous warriors, tall & skinny warriors, short and fatter ones.  But all had a small tummy sticking out - they were made to reflect the fact that they would be healthy and well-fed in the after life!  They also all had mustaches or beards!

You can see the reassembly work in progress at the rear of the building, in what is known as the hospital wing.  

There was also an active excavation going on in some of the pits, and we could see parts of warriors being excavated.

We visited two other pits - while Pit #1 had a lot of infantry, Pits #2 and #3 were a little ways behind, and had calvary as well as officers in a command center.

And finally, the best specimens were in cases in the museum so you could see them up close.  This archer was the most intact warrior found - his torso was all in one piece.

We learned that about a year after the death of Emperor Qin, his dynasty ended and his tomb was broken into and burned - so although all these warriors were brightly painted, all the paint had been burned off thousands of years ago.  Pits #2 and 3 had not been burned, so when discovered, there was still color on some figures.  Alas, they peeled right off about a week after they had been excavated, so all we have left are some photos.  That's one of the reasons that the Chinese government has slowed down excavation - they want to make sure that we have the right preservation technology so that doesn't happen again.  It was weird to think that there were countless treasures under the ground that we were walking on, but would probably never see in our lifetimes.

Overall, this was a wonderful experience.  It was a marvel to think that all this was created 2,200 years ago over the course of 30 years, with 700,000 workers (many of whom probably died in the process).

Making Noodles and Dumplings

 We checked into the Sofitel Xian and the most exciting thing I found in our suite was a washer/dryer unit.  I know all you moms out there will understand - I literally clapped with joy.  I had been faced with the possibility of sending little t-shirts, undies and socks out to the hotel laundry - now, I could do a couple of loads during our stay!  Ah, the simple pleasures...  Oh, the rest of the suite was very nice as well!

Dinner that night was at Le Chinois, the hotel's Chinese restaurant.  We had been really looking forward to this because we were slated to learn how to make dumplings and noodles.  We had been thinking we'd actually eat the product of our work, but we were served a beautiful meal to start. In retrospect, it was a good thing we didn't eat what we made... ;)

Here are the various kinds of dumplings we ate - aren't they beautiful?!

We then watched Ms Yan hand pull lo mein noodles for our noodle soup, which was wonderful.

After we were sated, we started off with Ms Yan trying to pull lo mein noodles ourselves.  I don't have a photo of this because my hands were covered with flour and I was too busy being frustrated.  Suffice to say, I would not have eaten anything we made - my big learning:  it's really, really hard to hand pull noodles.

We then moved on to dumplings.  A couple of them were quite easy to make.  One was very, very hard.  We made and remade multiple versions.  Our dough got a little messy.  Here's our final set of dumplings - the really nice ones were made by our teacher, although I thought some of mine were quite credible!

And finally, we made another kind of noodle that was a lot easier so the kids loved doing this..

We had a great time - this was a fabulous experience that we had access to by booking with a great tour company.  It was not something usually offered by the hotel and we wouldn't have been able to set it up on our own.

A Han Tomb in Xian

On the way into Xian from the airport, we stopped for a quick visit to Hanyanglin Museum, the site of the tomb of the 4th Emperor of the Han Dynasty.

The Chinese found a number of burial pits around the main tomb, but these were of a more modest scale than Emperor Qin's tomb with all the terracotta warriors (that we were scheduled to visit the next day).  The Hans typically created their retainers and soldiers for the afterlife at one-third scale and with molds, so they weren't all individually featured like the more famous terracotta warriors (who were created at a scale larger than the average male 2,000 years ago)

This was a fairly new museum, so everything was displayed very well.  We walked on a glass corridor that was above the burial pits, so we could look down and see all the figures.  Each pit had a specific function - the kitchen and pantry pits were the largest ones, reflecting the importance of food in Chinese culture.  That's where I get it from!

Taoist Temples and Tea

Our second day in Chengdu started with a visit to a old taoist temple where we had a brief overview of Taoism and met with a monk to chat about his life and to see his dormitory on the temple grounds.

He was pretty nice although I am not sure everything he said was being well-translated for us.  He had a nice room with a computer, mobile phone and lots of other modern appliances.  He did a short tea ceremony for us with both oolong and green tea, and another monk came by and gave us a short tai-chi demonstration.  He and Anders then decided to try and see who could unbalance the other first.  The kids thought that was hilarious.

 

We also did a fortune telling ritual with shaking the sticks out of the container, one of my favorite pursuits from a child when I visited any temple.  Then our monk interpreted the fortunes which were printed on a piece of paper that matched the number of the first stick that fell out when you were shaking.

I still remember our trip to Taiwan when I was a child where we learned that although I would have "middling fortune", my sister would have "supreme fortune"!  Our fortunes on this trip were nowhere near as specific or amusing!

And so, we said goodbye to Chengdu and took an hour long China Southern Airline flight (in a nice new Airbus A330) up to Xian for the next stage of our trip.

Feats of Engineering

We were hot and exhausted after our panda adventures and went to a very good Sichuan lunch in a nice place with unfortunately poor air-conditioning and a distinct lack of ice for their drinks!

We were originally slated to visit a museum after lunch but decided to change our plans and go see a 2,200 year old irrigation system at Dujiangyan instead.  In the temple at the top of the project, we saw a model of the whole system with an island built out of rocks placed in baskets in the middle of the river, called the fish mouth.  The island has since been rebuilt out of concrete.

The whole river diversion project was pretty impressive and the 2 mile walk would have been lovely if the weather had been slightly cooler.  As it was, many of the Chinese tourists were taking golf carts around, which zipped by us on the path at breakneck speeds, honking all the way.  Mei, who really wanted to ride the golf cart, would moan every time one zipped by!  This meant that our walk was not quite as relaxing as I would have anticipated ;)

There were a couple of fun swinging rope bridges for us to cross, which most of us enjoyed (Pooh was, of course, completely freaked out!)

Dinner that night was hot pot, a big Sichuan specialty - we had two pots of soup (one spicy, one not). The big difference for me was that we had an attendant cooking everything and serving us the whole time.  We later went down to a different level of the building and watched a brief show of face-changing, something that Sichuan Opera is famous for.  The masked performer basically tilts his head quickly and his mask changes - he did this about 10 times with 10 different masks, showed us his real face, then finished up with one final mask.  It was pretty cool to watch!