When we left the hotel in the morning the sky was clear and I was eager to see the Terracotta warriors I had been hearing about since elementary school. When we arrived we walked through the museum portion that explained the history of the warriors and their excavation process. I did not know that the warriors were discovered relatively recently and that the first section did not open to the public until 1999. After the small museum we got to see the warriors themselves. They are kept in three covered pits, each one an original excavation site. The first one was fairly small and only had a few broken pieces of the warriors, many of which were being excavated still. There was an active staging area for reassembling the broken warriors, but we went on the weekend so nobody was working there. A few of the shattered statues were laying down on tarps in what looked to be the most complicated jigsaw puzzle imaginable. I can’t imagine how hard it must have been to assemble the statues before the help of technology. The next one had a few more warriors and some horses as well, a number of which were intact. In total at this point we had only seen about thirty warriors and we knew there were many more so we rushed on to the final pit. The last pit put the others to shame both in size and the amount of warriors. Underneath a covering the size of an airplane hangar laid row after row of hundreds of terracotta warriors alongside horses and chariots. It is insane to think that they were created with such fine attention to detail only to be buried underground for 2,200 years. Then again, if they weren’t underground then they might not have survived long enough for us to see them today. I had to jostle with other tourists from every nation for a good picture until we had enough and left the warriors behind. We had a bit of a walk on the way back to the bus, and on the way we all noticed that the weather had definitely gotten worse. Visibility was down but it definitely wasn’t just cloudy. On the ride to lunch our guides told us that there was a dust storm kicking up and the air would soon be unsafe to breathe without a filtering mask, so we were all handed one and told to equip it once we were outside again. Our lunch was excellent, it was a “western style” buffet which meant it was similar to what Americans would expect from a Chinese restaurant, even down to the little desserts, but all the food is authentic. We couldn’t fill up too much at breakfast though because next on the list was a bike ride on the old city wall back in Xi’an. Of course on the one day we do physical activity in China the air quality is poor, but it wasn’t stopping any of us. We grabbed our bikes and helmets and went for a ride, it had to have been one of my most unique moments traveling to date. The wall was made of paved brick and it was massive, several cars could have driven next to each other on top with room to spare. Air quality was way down, at some points we could only see nine or ten buildings in any direction. Most of us were grouped up next to each other on our bikes along with our face masks and sunglasses to protect our eyes from the grit. I remember thinking to myself that the whole scene looked like something out of a low budget Mad Max sequel. After a while the weather cleared up and the sun came out, which gave the rest of our ride a more lighthearted feeling. I loved the bike ride and I would totally do it again!
5/12 Terracotta Warriors
