Terracotta Warriors

They call the Terracotta Warriors the "8th" Wonder of the World. It truly is an amazing thing to witness in person. It is just impossible to imagine orchestrating this project. The Terracotta Warriors is a form of funerary art buried with the Emperor of Qin in 209-210 BC. Their purpose was to help rule another empire with Shi Huang Di in the afterlife. In addition to the warriors, an entire man-made necropolis for the emperor has been excavated. The Terracotta Warriors were discovered in March 1974 by local farmer drilling a water well. His farm was taken so the could uncover the pits....so China made a "job" for him to support his family. They taught him how to sign his name so tourist and locals have him autograph books. He has become a celebrity in China. His siggy was pretty interesting.

An estimate of over 6,000 warriors in 3 pits. Also there was chariots with horses. All the Warriors are life sized and that no two are alike. Most researchers believe that each statue is based on an actual soldier of that time. It took over 700,000 workers to complete this feat.


Destruction of the Terracotta Warriors

There is evidence of a large fire that burned the wooden structures that once housed the Terracotta Army. It was described by Sima Qian, who said that the fire was a consequence of a raid on the tomb by General Xiang Yu less than five years after the death of the First Emperor. According to Sima Qian, General Xiang’s army looted the tomb and the structures holding the Terracotta Warriors, as well as setting fire to the necropolis and starting a blaze that allegedly lasted three months. Because of this, only one statue has survived intact: a statue of a kneeling archer. Despite the fire, however, much of the remains of the Terracotta Warriors still survives in various stages of preservation, surrounded by remnants of the burnt wooden structures.

Pictures:

1. Pit 1, the largest. It is rows and rows of the army. In the middle, the archeologists haven’t even started to dig yet! All the warriors had bronze swords and shields.
2. A bronze sculpture of the Emperor. It weighs close to a ton.
3. More of the army.
4. Warriors that is being pieced together. Only one warrior out of 6,000 survived, fully intact.
5. Ok….the Chinese people like to take photos of Westerners/African Americans. They would either just take my photo without asking or they would just run up and pose with me. Super weird!!!! I am in a several family albums now. They are especially fascinated with African Americans. They would just mob them and take a million photos with them. This guy is in China’s Army and just finished working with Earthquake destroyed cities.
6. The Kneeling Archer is the only warrior that survived the fire.

Xi'an

Xi'an (pronounced See – Ann)

We arrived early in the morning by train along with millions of other people who travel by train. The station was just out of control. Extremely congested. The train was bad. We actually was able to be upgraded to "soft sleepers". They were rooms with 4 beds in them and door to the hall way. We were next to a group of French tourists (remember...3rd worst tourists). They sang and chanted ALL night, drunk as hell. Super annoying. I haven't been drinking much fluids due be absolutely terrified of public restrooms and squatter toilets. Well today was the day I had to go. It was so bad! SO BAD. That squatter toilet will give me nightmares for ever. GROSS! Then you have to get out of the train with luggage that is WAY too heavy with thousands of people. It wasn't really fun for me. It was a low point. However, Xi'an is a great city. I really enjoyed it! Our tour guide said this was a "smaller" city.....only 7.4 million people live here. ONLY! Thousands of years ago, like most ancient city capitals in China, the Emperor built a wall around the city and it is still all up. It was beautiful to see. We took a bike ride on top of the wall on traditional Chinese bicycles around the entire city wall (about 8 miles). There was a little damage on the wall due to the earthquake. We were told that moments before we started to climb the stairs to the wall. I actually had fun for the first 5 miles. THen the sunset and it was hard to see....no to mention I haven't been to the gym in a very long time. The wall was pretty bad shape though. There was so many bricks missing which made huge pot holes and you had to avoid them like the Bird Flu. Xi'an is also were we discover Pizza Hut in China. Fantastic Pizza. Way better than what we have in the states. It is like an actual, upscale restaurant. Xi'an is also famous for Dumplings. We had the privilege to go to dinner and show and have 16 different dumplings served to us. The dumplings were shaped to look like the meat inside. So we had piggies and ducks and flowers and walnuts. It was pretty neat to see and I enjoyed the show. We also when to the Chinese Muslim quarters. They have this open air market that you can buy tons of stuff. It was pretty fun to negotiate with the people when buying stuff. More like a game to me. I was almost the victim of pick pocketing here. You have to be pretty careful. Overall, Xi'an was a great city. VERY smelly though.

Pictures:

1. A photo of a tower on the city wall taken on our bike ride.
2. Moat around the city wall.
3. Ryan on his Chinese bike.
4. The Bell tower located in the center of the city. The Drum tower was just down the street.
5. The drum performance at the Drum Tower.
6. Becks and Kerri on top of the Bell Tower.
7. Performance at the Dumpling Banquet.
8. Dumplings shaped as Ducks, Pigs and Lettuce.
9. Ryan and I in front of the South Gate of the city wall.
10. Muslim Mosque.
11. Giant Wild Goose Pagoda. It is an active Buddhist Temple. Monks there and pray there. Built in 652.
12. Busy street in Xi’an. Notice people and bikes all over the road. Traffic is a nightmare.

Blogging....

I am really trying to format this properly....but the program moves stuff and creates spaces or photos go in places that it shouldn't....so please bare with me!

Now back to your regular scheduled blogging....

Three Gorges Dam Project.

This thing was INCREDIBLE. I was actually amazed by this thing. It was huge. It cost just under 25 billion dollars to build and will be finished by 2011 (It started in 1994). The project was conceived by Dr. Sun Yat-Sen (remember him from Nanjing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Yat-sen ) in 1919. It is a Hydroelectricity generation and distributer which means it can produce and sell the power….(think the Hoover dam, it sales its power to Vegas). In just a few years, the dam will have sold enough power, that it will pay for it’s self. I am talking only in about 5 YEARS!! 25 BILLION DOLLARS! It will supply power for 3% of China’s population.

The shiplocks was the coolest part. Since the dam creates the river higher on one side and lower on the back side….the ships need to pass through them. So what happens, the huge ships go into the first lock. The water raises (or lowers depending on the direction it’s heading). As soon as it is level with the next lock, the doors open and the ship goes to the second lock. There are 5 all together. It takes 3 hours to go through all 5. They are in the process of designing a ship “elevator” for smaller boats.

The size of this project is just unbelievable. This is definitely a highlight of my trip. However it was short-lived cause after that, we drove to the train station for our first overnight train with the peeps.

BTW...my photos are not fuzzy....it all the pollution in the air!

Yangzi River Boat

Wow!!! DON’T go cheap if you do this tour. There are WAY nicer boats you can take. TRUST me. This is the part of the trip, I was not liking China. I wanted to leave. The boat was very nasty and saturated in mold. Our room was the most musky, moldy smell that I have every encountered. It was really bad, as well as the food. But when you go out and see the beauty of the river and its surroundings, you forget the smells and the horrible food. All you see is green slops for days and the locals growing their crops on the sides of mountain. Every foot was farmed for a crop of some sort primarily corn. It was just breath taking. We got to go off the “death boat” for a small day trip up a smaller river. We got to go on canoe looking boats and have boat trackers pull us up the river. It was an amazing thing to see. They worked so hard. They do this several times a day and only get around $10 per day. Tourism in China is down due to the Olympics and the Earthquake (May 12th). Especially in that area, tourism is down because we were pretty close to the center of the earthquake. We got to go through the Three Gorges. They were very neat to see.

Pictures:

1. Our boat looked a lot like this one
2. A huge cave
3. River view from the boat
4. View of the smaller river
5. Hill side crops
6. Another river view
7. One of the Three Gorges
8. A canoe boat with fellow Chinese tourists
9. Captain of our canoe boat
10. Boat Tracker
11. More Boat Trackers. They wear shoes made of rope. They have done so for centuries.
12. Boat Tracker taking a break. Most of the Trackers were elderly.
13. PULL!!! They did a great job.
14. Ryan and I at a top of a summit on the Yangzi River. We were just happy to be out of our “death boat”.

Nanjing

We took a bullet train to Nanjing. It wasn’t a scary train (we will talk about those later). The train station is super hectic and chaotic.

Nanjing use to be the capital of China until the early part of the 20th century. There wasn’t very much English and it wasn’t a city that many Westerners travel to. We took a bus to Dr. Sun Yat-Sen’s Mausoleum. The Chinese people believe the higher your coffin is, the closer to heaven you will be and look good for the Gods. So most of the Mausoleums were on top of hills and mountains facing south.

Pictures:

1. Ryan and I on the train. A few of our tour group members are behind us.
2. Our Group in front of the entrance of Dr. Sun Yat-Sen’s Mausoleum. 5 of us are from the USA. 4 are from Australia. 1 from England, 1 from South Africa (living in London) and 1 from New Zealand.
3. Ryan climbing the million stairs to the Mausoleum.
4. View of Nanjing from the Mausoleum.
5. A view from a cafe

Shanghai - First Stop

I can see why they call this the Cosmopolitan City. Shanghai is vibrant and fast-moving, truly breathtaking. They compare this city with New York meets Las Vegas. They have a little old, mixed with a very high tech new, mixed with Euro 18th century and neon everywhere. It was just really cool to see all the architecture. There were some amazing buildings. The people all tried to dress nice and had high heels on.

Our first day out, we were walking on Nanjing Street (a very expensive street that they closed to cars. Motorcycles, bicycles and scooters went on the street anyway. Think of the game Frogger.) Anyway, we were starving and scared out of our minds. We realized we are in a country that has NO clue what we are saying. All of a sudden, we see KFC, then Pizza Hut, then finally McDonalds! We were SO relived that we were not going to starve to death also know as the “China Diet”. McDonalds has some different items, but they had a FANTASTIC Egg McMuffin! We basically ate there every morning, even though it smelled horrific.

Ryan and I spent most of our first day on Nanjing Street. We realized quickly that there are these “fleas” that come up to you. “You want watch, you want shoes? We got purses!”. They would track all the “Western” looking people (American/Europeans) and follow them, begging us to follow them is some sketchy dark ally to go into a hidden shop. We did go once. It was quite the experience.

On the second day we went to the Bund. It is a part of where the Huangpu River meets the Pacific Ocean. It is pretty cool there. Buildings of all types. I really liked it there. We met a guy there named Liu. He followed us up and down the banks….practicing his English on us. The weird part is he only knew how to speak English when talking about his religion (Jehovah Witness). He was super nice. I tried to get as much info out of him as I could about China, but all he wanted to do is talk about God. After about an hour, we had to say good bye to our new friend Liu.

We ended up going across the river to the Oriental Pearl Tower, it is 468 meters. We were able to go up to the 350 meter deck, but it was so cloudy we couldn’t see anything….total waste of money.(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oriental_Pearl_Tower)

The next few days, we met our tour group and did this amazing walk around the city. Our tour guide, Charles, was super knowledgeable and took us to some places that we wouldn’t have gone by ourselves. It was really neat and eye opening at the same time.

I really enjoyed Shanghai. It was a little smelly, but probably my favorite city in China.

Pictures:

1. Ryan on our balcony of our Hotel
2. Nanjing Street
3. Liu and Ryan
4. A sign on the older part of Shanghai
5. Older part of Shanghai
6. Ally
7. Shanghai sky line from the Bund
8. Night view
9. Oriental Pearl up close
10. Acrobat show, there were 5 motorcycles in there!!