China Day 4: Xi'an

After we woke up, dressed, and disembarked the overnight train, we headed into the unknown world of Xi'an and found "Waldner" waiting for us...
It was nice to find our guide so easily. Waldner decided his Western name would be named after the Swedish table tennis player Jan-Ove Waldner. As we worked our way through crowds Caroline and I would ask, "Where's Waldner?"

Once again, the traveling is often as interesting as the site we are going to. These three wheeled trucks were cool. I'd seen three wheeled cars before, but a truck?! Carrying a tree no less.

Our first stop of the day was the Xi'an inner city wall. It's quite well preserved and maintained, so it is quite a site to see how the ancient capital city (at the time) defended itself. They really play up the site with decorations and costumed guards.

This is the view from on top of the wall. It's amazing how wide it is. The walls I'd seen in Europe were easily a third to a quarter as thick. This thing was massive. They had bastions sticking out of the wall at every 120 meters figuring archers could shoot 60 meters, so could hit anyone trying to climb up the wall from the side.

This was apparently the Test Shrine. It is where people went for some type of test... Not sure what kind.

You can rent bikes to ride on the wall. The wall goes all around the city center, so you can ride the bikes all the way around. As far as I could tell, each section of wall looked a lot like others, so we didn't ride the bikes.

The exterior of the wall. Yep, I'd hate to try to scale that wall...

The called this the fish-barrel. It is one of the gates into the city. The visitors would be let into this courtyard where you could be trapped in and shot at from all the surrounding walls. Now, it's a parking lot for the tour busses.

Our next stop was another state run craft shop. This time, it was a shop that makes Terracotta Warriors. Or, at least, souvenir versions of all sizes. We actually bought three smaller ones. They offered to ship the life sized ones, but where do you keep such a thing? They had headless warriors for taking pictures with. William doesn't need the silly costume!

The Terracotta Army is protected by a large enclosure. This is pit #1 and there are a total of 3 pits. The other two are much smaller. The army was discovered in 1973 by three farmers digging a well. They aren't farmers anymore. Only one is left and he signs books in the visitors center. They say that none of them could write at the time, but is now very good at signing his name...

It's hard to get a good close look of the ones in the pit. You view them from above and a ways away.

Still fascinating to see them all lined up.

A great deal of the place has yet to be excavated. Here, they are working to uncover the next area of warriors.

The whole site had been demolished and burned by a peasant uprising not long after it was built. So almost all of the army was found in this condition and had to be put back together.

I didn't realize that the warriors were originally painted to look life like. The paint would be present when uncovered, but fall off soon afterwards. Only the pictures record the color they had when uncovered. Little creepy if you ask me.

This is the Terracotta Army Hospital. It's where they reassemble the warriors as they recover the parts.

These guys were hiding behind a blue tarp. Guess they didn't count on tall, long armed people sneaking a shot over the tarp... It looks like they are using a turntable, lighting, and cameras to record the details of all sides of the completed warriors.

They also had some of the better examples on display where we could actually see them up close. They were an amazing site to see.

China Day 3: Temple of Heaven

After a couple of fast paced tour days, we decided to take it a bit slower. We took a leisurely morning to relax. There happened to be a History Channel special on the building of the Great Wall of China. Since we'd just seen it the other day, it seemed quite interesting and we hung around and watched it. As it got closer to lunch, we packed our bags and checked out of our room since we'd be sleeping on the train to Xi'an that night.

We'd been having mixed luck with the restaurant in the hotel. They had wonderful food, but they didn't have a children's portion to the menu and when we tried to special order things like "Fried Chicken" we got this very nice Wok fried chicken and vegetable dish spiced heavily with Ginger. Not exactly kid stuff and William wasn't impressed. Today, we elected not to eat at the hotel, but venture out toward the Temple of Heaven and find something to eat that William might like. We were living on the edge! As we got out of the cab and looked around, we spotted...

A KFC! It's a restaurant that is William and Dad approved! We've been dabbling in Chinese food for three days to this point. We needed something familiar.

The Temple of Heaven was a much more relaxed site to see than the ones we'd seen so far. It might be that we were finely into the work week and the crowds were less, but it also was the park like setting of the whole place. It was as full of trees and flowers and neatly groomed as any great city park, but with stunning Chinese temples and palaces spread around in the different places.

It was just a very relaxed place. Most everyone we saw there was sitting back and relaxing, talking, or playing games. I almost felt silly pointing the camera around like a madman trying to capture it all.

Honestly, they were playing games.

We rented an audio tour device for William. We've found that he stays far more engaged with the site seeing (and isn't running around and rolling his Thomas train on everything), if he has one of these things and he is pretty good at telling us the highlights from the recording. We do get some odd looks when we get just one and we give it to the six year old, but it works for us.

Once again, William is the center of attention most everywhere he goes and he is still happily posing for pictures with completely foreign strangers.

The glazed tile roofs are intricate and marvelous.

Whenever William would get close to a new site of interest, his audio tour would start talking about the item. He'd pipe up with, "It's talking again!"

The weather was really good on this day. As you could see from the previous day's pictures, it is usually quite hazy in Beijing and even in the Forbidden City, the buildings just across the courtyard were in the haze. On this day, it had totally cleared out and you could see out across the city without any haze. Wow!

Thomas made the rounds in the Temple of Heaven too.

We'd seen what looked like a playground along the entrance to the park. William had wanted to play, but we convinced him to do some site seeing first and then do the playground later. We had such a wonderful time in the park, that we'd forgotten about it until we were exiting. We headed over and were a bit startled with what we found. It wasn't a children's playground, but rather a grown-up's work-out area. William still found some things to play on, but Caroline and I were just amazed with the set-up and even more amazed at how many Chinese were out there really using them.

After the park, we headed back to the hotel for dinner. Oddly enough, they figured out that they did have a children's menu. It just took a little extra prodding and asking. Then, we were picked up and taken to the train station where we boarded our sleeper car on our overnight train and spent the night snoozing as we traveled to Xi'an some 600 miles away. William, who loves trains, proclaimed this as the BEST day of his LIFE!

In the morning, we disembark to go see the Xi'an city wall and the famous Tera Cotta Warriors!

Some sites around the Temple of Heaven including people playing cards and people playing hackie sac with an odd shuttle cock type device. William received one from one an Army guy that was relaxing in the park. Later, we are driving to the train station and passing Tiananmen Square and then finally getting on the train.

China Day-2 Forbidden City

The Forbidden City! The name alone is pretty intriguing. We'd also seen "The Last Emperor" so we were even more intrigued to see this site. We took off on the subway and came close to the entrance to the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square.

Did I mention the streets are WIDE!?

As we worked our way through the sales people, we were propositioned by an english speaking guide. We worked out a deal for a two hour tour (figuring that is as much as William could stand) and we headed out. Chinese tour guides usually choose an English name to use that is much easier for their customers to say. When he introduced himself to us, both Caroline and I heard "John Wayne". We thought that was pretty funny. We found out later on that it was actually his Chinese name "Chang Wang" and we just misheard... Our first stop was the river that goes through the compound.

To keep William occupied, he brought along his Thomas engine. I and Thomas tried to keep William occupied and out of trouble while Caroline took in most of the information and sites.

The expanses in the place are truly impressive. There are many courtyards similar to this just getting to this one. It is layers of bureaucracy in a way. A visiting official would have met higher and higher ranked personnel and would likely have been sent on at those levels. If the visitor was to actually see the Emperor, he would have finally gotten to this area of the compound.

The place looks like it is in original, yet well maintained, condition. Some buildings and stone work have been restored. You can see from this stone carving, that it has been around for a while.

As you get deeper into the Forbidden City, you get into the living areas of the Emperor and it gets a little bit more reasonable in size. The ornate buildings are stacked together to make some truly interesting views.

This is the emperor's throne room. It is where he did most of his work. The entire place is filled with original furniture and artifacts. Most of the architecture used to be open to the courtyards, but have been closed up with windows to protect the artifacts.

We learned that the color yellow was reserved for the Emperor. Nobody else could wear yellow, or use yellow in their architecture under pain of death. William wondered if he should be wearing yellow...

This is another throne room. We'd heard so much about the Dragon Lady by this point and how she used to run the country by instructing the Emperor from behind a yellow curtain that was behind the Emperor. You can see the whole set up here with the yellow curtain raised to show where the Dragon Lady sat behind the Emperor's throne.

These are some tied together shots of the last large courtyard prior to entering the living areas. Click on it to bring up the large photo. It gives you an idea of how intricate and expansive the Forbidden City really is.

Some more interesting architecture... and William occupying himself with some exercise. Not so sure he should be worried about wearing yellow... people can see your underpants!

Dragons represent long life and power and the guide insisted that we take a picture of William with the dragon.

The number 9 is apparently also representative of long life and power (a theme repeated many times in the Forbidden City...) and the brass knobs on the doors were 9 across and 9 high and people touch them for good luck. As you can see, they've been worn down. William gets a double dose of luck... This picture may be useful for blackmail later in life...

One of the salesmen really knew who to sell to. This is a top that lights up, screams an annoying song and even has a laser that spins around and lights up the area. The price was right, so we couldn't resist. You know, it didn't sound so loud out in the open, but inside...

So, those were the highlights of our Forbidden City tour. In the afternoon, we headed to a really terrific Chinese acrobat show.

On the way, we marveled at some of the impressive new architecture. This building just looks wrong.

Not as wrong as this building right next to it, though. It apparently was burned completely up when the builders set off a new-year's fireworks display too close to the unfinished building. One fireman was killed, lots of people lost their jobs, and several people went to jail. To this point, nobody knows what to do with the building. A sad story in any country.

The acrobatic show was truly incredible. I'd seen Chinese acrobats as a child in Portland when they came on tour. They've made their shows a bit more flashy which I assume is due to the influences of Cirque du Soleil. We had fourth row seats for the hour long show and truly enjoyed it. Unfortunately, they don't allow pictures or video, so we only have this picture of a poster to show you. We have the DVD we bought, though, so ask to see it when you visit!

Day 2 complete. Coming up: Temple of Heaven and the train to Xi'an!