My tour group was made up of three Canadians, Karen, Scott, and Veronica.Karen and Scott were brother and sister, and they went to school with Veronika, who now works in China. They’d been traveling around for the past two weeks and really covered a lot of ground. Our driver took us to the tomb which was about an hour outside of town. Jingdi was one of the Han dynasty emperors (most Chinese people today are ethnically Han.) He led China to an era of great prosperity.
On the way to the temple, we stopped at a gas station. Our driver (who spoke virtually no English) insisted that we all get out of the car while he fueled up. We noticed that everyone else was also having their passengers wait at the curb while the drivers of the vehicle fueled up the cars.
The tomb looked like a giant hill from the outside. In order to go inside we had to wear these blue shoe covers that looked like shower caps. I'm not sure if they were to protect our shoes or the tomb, but they worked. I remember that they made my feed incredibly sweaty inside my sandals.
Inside, the tomb was filled with pits that had different clay carvings of animals, concubines, and euunichs, as well as pottery and life size chariots. We walked across a glass floor that let us look down into the pits. Information signs informed us that the belief was that all of the ceramic statues would come to life in the afterlife. In other words, the animal statues would be the emperor's food, while the concubines and euunichs would keep him company.
At the end of the tomb was a little museum. There was a movie every 15 minutes in which a holographic man explained the history of the Han dynasty. It looked like the little kid that winds up inside the TV in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.
Outside, we went around the side of the tomb to the South Gate, which was the more formal entrance to the tomb. All of the signs were in Chinese but we gathered that the emperors actual body might have been underneath the ground we were standing on.
One of the more humorous things I remember from that day was that we couldn't find our driver after we exited the tomb. We walked around for several minutes looking for him, before we realized that he was sleeping in the backseat of the car.
The driver dropped my fellow travelers off at the bank on the way back before taking me to the hostel. When I got back, I was really hungry so I decided to walk over to the Muslim Quarter for lunch. I'm glad I did, because it was incredible. It felt as if I'd left Xi'an and was in yet another entirely different world. There was street food everywhere and it all smelled amazing. I remember people crushing nuts with giant hammers, the powder being used to make homemade taffy like candies.
The meal I wound up getting for lunch however was not one of the better ones. I'm choosing to this day to believe that it was noodles in lamb broth, but I am aware it may have been something else...something I may not have eaten if I'd known for sure. I gagged it down along with some sort of blackish tea that was really bitter but had a sweat after taste.
As I finished eating and wound my way back through the streets, I was surprised when I saw an older lady yelling at some teenagers for littering. Littering doesn't really seem to be a problem in China (both in that you don't see a ton of it, but when you do see it, no one seems to care.)
I went through little side alley after little side alley walking past vendor selling all of the typical tourist junk. It turns out that in Xi'an you can buy Terra Cotta Warriors everywhere.
On accident, I found the Xi'an Mosque. Paying for a ticket, I went inside.
For my first mosque, it wasn't super traditional. There was definitely a lot of Buddhist influence with the garden that surrounded it. There were a lot of archways that divided the garden, the most memorable of which was the Pheonix arch. It didn't resemble the fiery bird at all, but it was grand with lots of pointed spires above each of the three walkways. I also remember being disappointed that the minaret was under construction (my first mosque and I don't even get to see the minaret.) The prayer room was closed to tourists so I wasn't able to go inside of it either.
While I didn't want to type out my whole journal entry here (mostly because it is long and I need to get to some homework) I do want to reproduce a small part of it that struck me tonight.
I sat down on the steps and looked around at the flags fluttering around the top of this particular courtyard. It was in that moment that I realized all that I had done in these past 10 weeks. It reminds me of the games my brother and I used to play when we were little. Jumping around on the couch, we'd be astronauts, or pirates, or explorers. Sometimes we were colonizing aliens, others we were sailing across stormy seas, and others still we were in magical jungles fighting gnomes and freeing leprechauns.
While I'd hardly call my travels these past few weeks "heroic" they were "epic" in their own right. I've learned a ton. I've learned that people everyone really are good. I truly believe that evil is a man-made concept and that people everywhere are just doing what they think they have to do to survive. On the note of survival, I've realized I can survive more than I knew. From strange foods, to unbearable heat, China has been harder that Europe ever was.
At the same time, I think in a lot of ways, China has been more transformative than Europe was. Maybe its just because I did China second so I was able to "finish what I started" in Prague, but I feel like I've gone even deeper and have yet a new understanding of myself and the world. It's been hard, but I don't want to go home. I feel like I'm in survival mode every second of every day...but I've never felt more alive.Back at the hostel, I messaged with Brenda about staying with her and Dayana when I got back to Shanghai. They told me that they would only have room for me to sleep on the couch one more night. I started looking for a hostel in Shanghai, while also meeting some of my new room mates.
When Arafat got back that night, we went out walking again. We saw the bell tower and the drum tower all lit up and they were beautiful. We stopped for green tea ice cream and walked around more tight little alleys (which were way creepier at night)
When I got back to the hostel, I journaled about the day. The last sentence I wrote in the journal was:
A year from now, I'll be done with school and life will look totally different. For the first time, I think I have a direction of where I want to go...but I have no idea of where to start to get there.
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