Terracotta Warriors

I don't think I was hungover, because I felt fine in the early morning, but by the time we had bussed out to the terracotta warrior site I was sort of limping, and another day of blistering hot sun left me feeling completely fried. Of all the sites I saw on my China trip, I'd have to say that the warriors might have been the biggest letdown. Not because they weren't cool, they just weren't as cool as my mind had cast them as. I remember poring over the National Geographic magazine that had pictures of the warriors when I was little, and I was just fascinated by how they all had different faces, and the details on the weapons and the chariots and all that stuff.

In person, you have to climb a long but gradual incline to get to the three pits where the warriors live. Climbing the hill you pass by vendors selling water and ice cream and hats and fans and, rather perversely given the incredible heat of the day, fur caps and scarves.

By the time we got up to the front of the warehouses that house the pits I was having little hot-cold tingles and was thoroughly overheated. The rest of the afternoon was kind of a blur, but I did retain a couple of fascinating facts.

The chrome plating on the arrows and the shafts of most of the weapons found in the pits was pretty advanced stuff. In fact, the chrome plating technology was so advanced on these 2,000+ year old weapons that similar technology was not utilized again until the 20th century by Germans and Americans.

Also, I made sure to take plenty of pictures of headless terracotta warriors from above, for my brother, because you can see right down into their neck holes. I did find the warriors oddly easy to empathize with, which meant I was doing a lot of anthropomorphizing. "They're not real people," I kept having to remind myself, even though I was feeling more upset by their broken bodies and tangled torsos in heaps down in the dig site that I've felt at actual graves before, or in the plague pits in Europe.

Got back to the hostel and I slept for the rest of the night except for a brief time when I got woken up and fed some sort of crispy tasty meat-inna-bun that Brennan found in the nearby Muslim district. I guess I earned at least one day with malady on my trip.

I felt completely recovered by the next morning and woke up fresh and bright and early. I went walking before it got miserably hot out and decided that really all that I'd needed was an incredibly long nap to heal myself.