Poo Day

We came to Xi'an mainly because its fame since a farmer came across the macabre remains of emperor Qin, who made terracotta soldier depictions of his army, to protect him in the afterlife, before he finished off the real-life warriors. Two thousand two hundred years and one early morning later, I find myself at a youth hostel eating an American breakfast, waiting for a bus that never arrives.

The terracotta soldiers were of course a marvellous discovery, and a very cool collection of historical artifacts, but without finding the story behind a little interesting, the site today is little more than a giant tourist trap. And our bus never showed up, and we had to make it there on our own, but we teamed up with two very nice English girls, and did everything on our own, that is John was negotiating with everyone for prices.

Today we had dim sum for breakfast and met up with our new friends despite the lack of fool proof planning. I went with them to Shaanxi History Museum, which was a pretty comprehensive collection of artifacts found in the region, dating back from about 4000 BC. John didn't come, because he's all touristed out, but if ht'd been there, we would have had plenty of opportunity to nerdily merge Shaanxi history with CivIII gameplay. The museum, like most history museums, had a few too many almost identical pots, and arrowheads to keep me continuously entertained, but all in all it was a pretty neat place. And it's interesting to note how a similar museum in Norway would have their historic artifacts dated about 3000 years later — when the Chinese made large ornamented copper kettles, the Scandinavians were roaming tribes that caught fish with their hands and ate it raw. Or I might be exaggerating. But in Civ-terms, if the Chinese had attacked the Vikings around year 0, the puny Vikings would have been no more than a legend.

After saying good-bye to the Brits, John and I had what we thought was a sufficiently quick dinner before heading off to the train station for our night train to Beijing. Unfortunately, Xi'an taxis have peak hours where no taxis are available, and this coincided with our approaching departure time from Xi'an train station. As time passed we got a little desperate, and ended up hailing one of those moped taxi things, with a driver that promised he could get us there in a jiffy — so we got in and John said: "It's all up to you now". Knowing that Chinese traffic is scary, and that Chinese taxi drivers have nerves of steel and no manners, this was a rather bold thing to say: the driver stretched the rules of traffic now and then, and broke them the rest of the time — changing lanes, going against traffic, throwing himself in front of busses, and basically risking our lives — and getting us there in 12 minutes, rightly deserving a five kuai tip. All in vain, we missed our train, thanks to the impeccably on-time commie trains.

This is of course a major drawback, for our schedule and not least economically, but the Chinese Railway refunded our tickets 80 %: we approve! After deciding to go for airtickets and a lot of help from a remarkably agreeable travel agent, we've ended up with plane tickets to Beijing tomorrow morning, and we're staying at a hotelroom without windows, with cockroaches, and with internet (win some - lose some). Wish I could say it was all for the best, but it isn't, but it's worked out pretty well. Kind of a mix between a Good Poo Day (GDP) and just a poo day.