Day+5+May+26

May 26th (T): Tour the Terra Cotta Warrior Site, Folk Paintings in County Hu, Great Tang Lotus Gardens, and enjoy a dumpling banquet at night
 * DAY 5: May 26** [[image:DSC_0038.JPG width="380" height="252" align="right" caption="Thousands of warriors..."]]

We changed up our itinerary in Xi'an, as you might have noticed based on yesterday's report. The folk paintings and the Lotus Gardens happened yesterday; today we did indeed visit the Terra Cotta Warrior site, but we also toured the Xi'an City Wall—at least most of us did. Mike H. lost his passport at the end of the evening last night along with a few other belongings in a bag he'd been carrying with him. A glitch in our plans, but we are managing. We did discover a few things along the way: 1) it really stinks to lose a passport; 2) the police in China, even in a city the size of Xi'an, by some accounts with more than 4 million people, are remarkably efficient (at two different stations we never waited in a line or sat in a waiting room); and 3) our tour guides, Reagan and Shari, are total rock stars. We'll have some hoops to jump through to replace the passport and the visa once we get to Shanghai, but Reagan and Shari did a marvelous job navigating the city and the police to get the paperwork we needed to get Mike with us on the next leg of our travels, which did not always seem to be in the cards today.

In any case, we also had some awesome travel experiences today, most particularly the visit to see the site of the terra cotta warriors. Some call this discovery the 8th wonder of the world. One guide book lists this as the number 3 top "must see" in China, behind the Forbidden City and the Great Wall. The warriors may not be as universally well known, but they are amazing. Since an initial accidental discovery of a clay head by a farmer drilling for water in 1974, archaeologists have uncovered the remains of some //eight thousand// terra cotta warriors, soldiers designed to accompany China's first recognized emperor into the afterlife. By design, these soldiers were truly individual, with distinct faces and features, and assigned a variety of roles, just as in a real army. Along with the soldiers were horses and their drivers, though the wooden carriages most of them drove have long decayed. Few of the soldiers, if any, survived all this time in one piece. In the 35 years since discovery, attention has been made to restoring what can be restored of so many soldiers crushed, broken, and jumbled together. The museum housing these discoveries is wonderfully maintained in three separate and grand buildings, the first at least the size of two football fields. I took a ton of pictures, only a few of which I'll post here. The rest we'll share when we return home. My camera made the trip to the Xi'an City Wall, but I did not. The boys and the other faculty will have to fill us all in on that part of our day another time.

Tomorrow we fly to Shanghai, which most people say is China's most "Western" city. That may be true, but I've been consistently struck by how Western China feels, even in Xi'an. The cars, the clothes, the attitudes, the manners, the advertisements, the stores, (the traffic!): so much seems very familiar. The language is a barrier, but that is probably the single most significant factor in making the experience feel "foreign." We'll soon see whether Shanghai confirms these impressions.