The eighth wonder of the world

15 04 2010

Yesterday we went to see the Terracotta Army.  The Terracotta Army is a whole army, current estimates say 8,000 man strong, constructed by Emperor Qin around the year 200 BC.  Most of the figures are full sized and every figure is unique in shape and facial features. 

The emperor constructed his army to support him in the afterlife.  The emperor didn’t stop there and built a whole city in addition to his army.  There are acrobats and musicians, all kinds of animals, offices and stables and everything that comes with a proper city.

The site was found by a couple of farmers digging for water some thirty years ago and stumbled onto the first pit.  Now three pits have been excavated but some archeologist believe that even more pits wait to be discovered.  I just wonder how many sites like this exist in the world – uncovered and hidden to everyone?

Getting to the site was very easy – just a bus straight from the train station.  There was a constant stream of visitors arriving at the gate, mostly Chinese tourists but also a few foreigners. 

After buying the tickets there is a twenty minute walk to the main sites.  Along the way there are several restaurants including KFC and Subway and a lot of shops selling stuff made from jade, stuff made from fox/wolf/mink skins and terracotta warrior replicas.  The whole place had a very commercial feel to it – in a nice way though.  I couldn’t resist all the sales people and bought a very nice skin hat – similar to the Mao hat I had previously bought ;)

After the walk we arrived at the main gate.  We had only heard the best things about the Terracotta Warriors so at this point we were very excited! 

The site consists of a museum and three excavation pits.  We started at the museum, which contained examples of what was found in the pits as well as explanations on how all the stuff was made, why it was made and by whom.  After the museum we headed for the smallest pit that gave us a taste of what was to come.  The second pit wasn’t that exiting and hasn’t been fully excavated.  The third pit is the main attraction and contains the real Terracotta Army. 

It was very impressive to see all those soldiers lined up like they were ready for battle.  It was also very interesting to see the archeologists still working on digging up more figures.  We were very impressed with the whole site and really happy that we came to see this wonder but I couldn’t resist the thought that maybe it has been hyped up a bit too much.

It is very interesting to see how the Chinese approach archeological discoveries like the Terracotta Army and others that we have seen here in China.  They have a different approach to what we are used to seeing, at least back home.  The Chinese don’t hesitate to rebuild and fix or even recreate artifacts and buildings without distinguishing the from the authentic artifacts.  This makes it sometimes difficult to differentiate between the old and the new or the authentic and the re-created.  At the same time it is of course really interesting to see how things looked like when they were first created and you can better see the whole picture when the blanks have been filled.

This site is a perfect example of how crazy us humans can get.  Why would someone want to build such a mausoleum for him self?  It has been estimated that construction the whole mausoleum involved some 700,000 workers and took several years.  At the same time it shows the power of the emperor and how prosperous his nation must have been being able undertake such a project.  What do you think?  How do you want your mausoleum to look like?


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Of Chinese hotpots

14 04 2010

When we arrived in Xi’an we were greeted by my colleague Yong, Yong and I were classmates in the MBA in St. Gallen last year.  Yong lives and works in Xi’an and was at the train station with his colleague Mr. Lee.  Yong and Mr. Lee were kind enough to show us around until we could check in to our hotel at noon.

We saw the fanciest part of town where the government has built a great looking garden to jack up real-estate prices in the surrounding areas.  It is quite obvious that there is no recession in Xi’an, you can see building cranes everywhere and a lot of things going on. 

We went to a culture center that acted both as a museum displaying traditional Chinese art – paintings, sculptures and antiques – as well as a restaurant and a meeting place for the rich.  The whole place was fancy to say the least but the fanciest piece in the whole place was a nice piece of pork that had been conserved in some kind of transparent coating.  Very arty!

For lunch Yong and Mr. Lee took us to a Chinese hotpot restaurant.  We had never tasted a Chinese hotpot before so we were very excited.  On the table came two pots, one with some kind of lightly seasoned fish broth and a the other with a spicy kind of chili soup. 

We went to a communal table to create a dipping sauce where we could choose from about twenty different ingredients: garlic, chili,  spring onions, ground peanuts, sesame oil, soya sauce, peanut sauce, fish sauce and many others that I didn’t recognize.  We just followed Yong and tried to do as he did.  In the end our dipping sauces tasted great :)

Finally all sorts of things to dip into the boiling hotpots came to the table: mutton, beef, ground meat, mushrooms, seaweed, noodles, beads, fish balls and cabbage and I’m sure I’m forgetting a few items.  Gradually the dipping things were were dipped into the hotpots to boil and then we ate them.  We can both agree that this was absolutely fantastic and the best Chinese food we have ever tasted.  We had a Japanese hotpot in Bangkok but this was much better, especially the spicy one. 

Thank you very much Yong !!!

After the late lunch we had no choice but to go back to our hotel to digest and relax for the rest of the day.  We watched Resident Evil II on the computer – highly recommended …hehe.


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When we woke up in Xi’an

14 04 2010

We spend our last whole day in Beijing strolling round Central Beijing.  We walked to Tiananmen Square where I bought a old fashioned Chinese/Russian winter hat.  We had been stared at before but nothing like when I had the hat on.  Later we were told that the Chinese connect the hat with Chairman Mao and his followers.  We were also approached by several Chinese people that wanted us to pose with them on photos.  We felt like rock stars but somehow this was a strange and surreal experience.

After checking out Tiananmen Square and the surrounding buildings we walked to Jingshan Park.  The park is located on a small hill, 45 m. above the very flat surroundings, just behind the Forbidden City.  There seems to be an (small) entrance fee where ever you go here but and we paid 2 Yuan to get in (15 cent).  The view from the top of the hill was great!  We saw over the Forbidden City and basically all over Central Beijing – or as far as the smog allowed us – and this was something we should have done on day one for sure.

Before heading in for the night we had a wonderful Pizza at Hutong Pizza a well hidden Beijing treasure.  In the morning it was time to train to Xi’an.  We had to postpone our departure to Xi’an for one day because the Hard Sleeper class we wanted was full.  The west train station in Beijing is huge but very well organized.  Right in the lobby there was a big sign telling us which of the twelve waiting rooms to use and forty minutes before departure we were allowed to check in.

The train had double decker coaches and each floor had about twelve open cabins with four bunk beds – two lower and two upper.  We bought upper bunk tickets both because they were cheaper but also because we had heard that it would be easier to sleep in the top beds.

The train ride was twelve hours and went by pretty quickly.  It was very easy to sleep in the nice beds.  Even though they were a little hard they were way better than the buses in Thailand.  We found us in Xi’an at 06:20 in the morning – roaring to go.


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New “Trips” page

11 04 2010

As you have probably noticed, I changed the theme of the blog.  I hope the upgrade went OK – I can’t really tell from where I’m sitting.  Hopefully you’ll let me know is something is wrong.  How do YOU like the change though?

I just created a summary page with all the trips on this blog (…I know they are only 3 now but will hopefully be many more in the future :).  You can access the page here or in the new menu above under “The trips on this blog”.  I also removed the South East Asia map that has been accessible on the right hand side.  The map can now be found on the new Trips page.

If you have any comments or recommendations – please post them to me!


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Brrrrr…. it’s cold in Beijing

11 04 2010

When we arrived in Beijing the weather was very nice, 20°C and sunny, better than in Hong Kong, which lays almost 2,000 km. south of Beijing.  When we woke up on Friday however the weather seemed freezing cold to us even though it was about 13°C but quite windy.

Despite the cold we went to the Forbidden City – probably the most famous site in China.  We walked from our guesthouse to Tiananmen square and walked through the Gate of Supreme Harmony, which sports a nice portrait of Chairman Mao.  The Gate overlooks a massive courtyard where the rulers of the past could address up to 100,000 people at the same time. The Meridian gate marks the beginning of the Forbidden City and we joined the constant stream of hundreds of people flowing through gates.

We mainly followed the south/north axis of the city that contains all the biggest halls and buildings.  I don’t know if it was the weather but we felt that the city was a very cold place and not very inviting.  There are big gray plazas between great halls that all looked similar but no one was allowed to enter the halls.  It wasn’t until the Imperial Garden that we felt any warmth in the place.  Due to the cold we didn’t stay too long in the Forbidden City but we’ll return to Beijing before we go home and have already planned to return to the Forbidden City and explore it further.

Most of the afternoon went into searching for warmer clothes.  We wanted to find something cheap and that wasn’t too easy since we were in down-town Beijing.  I found a nice Burberry coat for $4,000 and an Armani coat for $2,000 but that wasn’t exactly what I was after :)  Finally we found a sweater for me for $16 and a nice running jacket for Elínborg for $7 and two pairs mittens for $7 so for $30 we got what we wanted.

On Saturday morning we walked for an hour to see the Lama Temple, the most renowned Tibetan Buddhist temple outside Tibet.  The weather man had said that today would be colder than yesterday but we were happy to see the warm sun and the weather was quite nice.  The Lama temple was beautiful and we could sense the peacefulness that surrounded the temple as soon as we arrived.  The whole temple stunning but the most famous artifact is a 26m. or about six stories high statue of Buddha that was carved out of a single white sandalwood tree – quite impressive.

We ended the day by eating Beijing (Peking) duck at the Beijing Dadong Roast Duck Restaurant, highly recommended by Lonely Planet.  We had been looking forward to this moment of months and were quite excited.  Unfortunately the duck was overpriced and even though it was good it wasn’t any better than at Nings in Reykjavík.  We have not given up on Peking duck and will continue trying until we find the perfect duck!

We have been quite surprised that Beijing feels like the most westernized place that we have visited on the whole trip.  Maybe westernized is not the right word – it is most like what we are used to in the west.  Maybe it is the climate that makes the difference but the people most like the people back home apart from the different faces of course.  They are similarly dressed and have all the latest gadgets and all that stuff.  The traffic is also most like we are used to with mostly cars on the streets.  Maybe there are more bicycles outside of down town Beijing – we’ll find out soon enough.

After listening to Lost on Planet China we has some implanted ideas about China and the Chinese but so far many of them have proven wrong.  The Chinese are not as rude the author proclaims, they are not spitting or blowing their noses at every step and the menus in restaurants are in English and the food is quite good so most things have a more positive spin that we thought :)


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From Hong Kong to Beijing

8 04 2010

On our second day in Hong Kong we had planned to take an open air double decked bus tour around the city.  When we woke up the weather would have nothing of it though.  It was raining and kind of cold so for the first time during our trip the weather made us change our plans and first we went to the Hong Kong museum of Art and then we went shopping.  I have never seen so many shops anywhere and the luxury brand stores here will make even Bahnhofstrasse in Zurich blush!

In the evening we saw the Symphony of Lights, a fabulous light-show where the sky-scrapers on Hong Kong island are the main actors.  The lights on the sky-scrapers dance to the rhythm of a specially composed music and you can kind of see the character of the sky-scrapers on how they dance.  Some are shy and minimalistic while others are cocky and a bit of a show-off and everything between. 

This morning we took the short flight to Beijing and landed in Beijing in the afternoon.  The weather in the capital was nice and the temperature was about thirty degrees hotter than when we flow through in January.  We have been quite impressed with the Chinese so far.  People have seemed cheerful and there is a pleasant wibe everywhere we have been. 

The taxi drives tried to scam us though.  We knew that we should pay 15 Yuan ($2) from the train station to our hostel but they didn’t want to talk to us for less than 100 Yuan.  We met two girls that told us they paid 300 Yuan ($45) for a ride that was supposed to be 20 Yuan.  Fortunately we found a tourist information office that helped us out.  It shows what we knew that you have to know everywhere what is the right price to pay for things or else you will be overcharged.

In the evening we went to a touristy night market that sold food and snacks from all over China.  On offer were for example grilled snakes and scorpions and worms, lamb testicles and penises, pig kidneys and hearts and cow stomachs and many other mouth-watering dishes.  We were not so adventurous and had fried dumplings, chicken pancakes, Chinese hamburgers and deep-fried ice-cream for dessert.  All of the dishes we tried were very delicious.  Hopefully we’ll go again and perhaps we’ll be more adventurous then ;)


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