Let's get down to business to defeat the Huns~ (China 2016)

Whoa. I can't believe I was in China last week! It seems unreal.

Before China, I had a week of deskwarming, which is one of the things people complain about teaching in Korea but a thing I actually enjoy. I studied a it for my TOPIK test, which I will take in March, and then I watched a lot of dramas and chilled.

Tina and I watched "Remember" which was awesome. Some real emotional payoff and lots of feels. Listen to this song while you read:

You can read the English lyrics along with it, or just listen to the song. The song is called "I Can Say I Love You" and is basically like "my life is really hard and whatnot but I'm thankful I can say I love you to you by my side" sort of thing and I really, really love it. 

I'm also watching "Cheese in the Trap" which was adapted from a webtoon, but after a long talk with my coworker it seems the drama falls far short of the original material in a lot of ways. Though I haven't read the webtoon, I must assume this is true since the drama lacks in a lot of ways for the main male lead but the other characters are pretty great. The drama got a lot of hype but now is getting more criticism. Korean dramas are filmed much more "as they go" than American ones, so sometimes stuff that got put in the beginning falls away or things veer off weirdly more than they do in dramas of other countries. It's cool to observe, but frustrating to watch.

Anyway, we finished everything and got ready for China.

We learned our lesson from Japan and booked a not-so-early flight at around noon. This time we left from Gimpo, the smaller of Seoul's airports, and we had a fairly relaxed time getting through everything.

The flight itself was all right. Not a great descent, but we lived. Customs and all that was okay too.

Now the worrying part. We had booked a tour with airport pickup and we were praying that it worked and we didn't get scammed into China with no guide. Fortunately, it all went smoothly as our guide and driver met us at the airport and took us right to our hotel with no problems.

Tada! 

One of the funnier things in our hotel room was the condom display. Not free, but still available so good job China for being responsible.

Our tour didn't really start until the next day, so we had the rest of the day free. Once we got through all the airport stuff and got to the hotel, it was already early evening.

Tired from the traffic in China, we stayed close to our hotel and wandered around the shopping center and outside nearby at the train station. 

Spotted: Kim Woo Bin! Looks like China has Woobinfluenza too!

We also got dinner by ourselves:

Don't judge. Chinese Mcdonalds cost like $6 or $7. And tasted different than Korean.

The next day we got up bright and early to explore Beijing.

First a quick stop to this big egg.

It's actually the national theatre but whatever.

After some security checks, we went to Tiananmen Square to explore.

There were guards and police literally EVERYWHERE in Beijing but especially here. A lot of them had assault rifles, but apparently China is pretty safe. Idk. This guy's job has a lot of honor since he stands by the flag, so he is set for life once he changes jobs.

After a look around the square, we made our way to the Forbidden City.

Like Korea, only the Emperor and his people could use it, and there are a lot of different parts. Forbidden to common people, we felt cool being inside.

Outside selfiessss

Us messing around. Tour guide doing his job.

I think I might have found the whole thing more impressive had I not been to a Korean palace. This one was on a much grander scale than the Korean ones, but still similar in shape, structure, architecture, color, and most things.

There are 5 bridges.

You rank determines which bridge you use.

Outside the main hall where the Emperor's throne is. 

And here is a side note: Tina and I are not Chinese, nor are we Asian. We also do not look either of those things. Also we are super white and have curly blonde (both of us are considered blonde but Tina is blonder...) hair that is startling noticeable in a sea of black hair. As a result, we got a lot of stares. We're used to being obviously foreign as we live in Korea, but some of it was unreal.

On this trip we got asked to take pictures at least 30 times. Who knows how many more surreptitious/trying to be sneaky but obvious/got caught taking pictures we were captured in.  It was cute with kids and families, and creepy with adult men taking pictures of us walking or standing or coming really close and just looking us up and down. I know we look different, but we're not zoo animals. 

I can understand why celebrities get upset or frustrated with it. A few times was fine, but after a while it was exhausting. And it was hard to steel ourselves to during the whole trip. We thought Korea was bad, but it was like the day that we wore hanboks to the palace but ALL THE TIME. It wasn't high tourist season so maybe there would be more distribution of foreigners during a normal time. And apparently (according to our second guide) a lot of them were probably from villages or smaller cities where they don't see foreigners much. We were at touristy stuff, so I can't exactly blame people, but it was a lot.

That said, sometimes it was cute or funny:

See? With kids it's adorable

Look at how cute they are. 

It still felt a little unreal. Like, to our left is where the Chinese government held office for 500 years, and you want a picture of me? Okay...

Anyway, we continued learning about Chinese history through the palace.

The doors began to have Mongolian characters too!

After our stint at the Forbidden City, we went to a tea tasting and got some energy along with some delicious tea.

Tina demonstrating the correct pose. Women stick their pinky out (phoenix) and men keep it tucked under (dragon).

Tea tasting~

After tea, our bellies were all prepped for lunch!

If we had only eaten these two dishes on the whole trip I would have been happy. So delicious. Side note: Chinese chopsticks are a lot different than Korean ones, and harder to use. They're longer and the ends are rounder so it was harder to grip things. 

After lunch we headed to the Temple of Heaven, where they would ask the heavens for good harvests and blessings an whatnot. It was built by the same emperor who built the Forbidden City, and there are also temples built to like earth and such around the city too. This one is the most important because duh heaven.

When our tour guide leaves us to wander we have to bust out the selfie stick.

The temple is really open and spacious, and it was nice to just walk around and have things explained to me. 

Apparently if you stand on this and ask heaven your wish will come true.

All in all it was a really great time.

For more pictures of the first day in Beijing, see here.

After a long day of walking around and taking in sights and sounds, we made it back to our hotel where I had a bubble bath for the first time in who knows how many years. It was awesome.

We rested up and began our second day in Beijing, and it was the day with the thing we had really come to China to do: climb the Great Wall!

But first, the Ming Tombs.

The Ming Dynasty was probably the dynasty we heard about the most in Beijing, so visiting the tombs was cool.

First we walked down the Sacred Way, about a half mile path lined with animals and generals and such welcoming us.

Then we made it to the tomb part. Chinese tombs aren't like ours, and most of the stuff isn't even accessible since they won't open the tombs (to do so would destroy everything in it almost immediately) so we just observed and learned a lot. 

The pillar is the symbolic structure of the mausoleum 

In the tunnel to the tomb

Making Dragon faces 

After the tombs we stopped for lunch and then made our way to the Great Wall!

There are three parts of the wall accessible from Beijing. Originally we were going to go to one of the bigger sections with a cable car on account of my ankle, but due to high winds the car wasn't running. We would have had to walk 1.5km before even getting to the wall, so we opted to go for the steeper, smaller, and closer option.

Stylin'

I am not trying to exaggerate the steepness of these stairs. They were insane.

We only made it up to a few watchtowers before my ankle had had enough, but we were glad. The thing about the Great Wall is that there is no end destination. We wanted to climb the wall. No matter how far we went, we accomplished that.

Woo!

We are the watchers on the wall.

Feelin' pretty good

It was really cool! We impressed some Koreans (they commented on our hair and we answered them in Korean) and met a lot of people who wanted to take our pictures again. A lot of people got to the first watchtower and quit, so the next few had fewer people. Tina and I took a lot of fun pictures.

Seriously I have no idea how people lived and climbed this more than once.

Checkin' out China

Stretch that ankle

After wandering on the wall and the surrounding area for a few hours, we headed into the Olympic area of Beijing.

We saw the Olympic village, some of the stadiums, the hotels, and the Bird's Nest.

It was really windy though.

After, we had some time to kill, so we went to a silk shop. We went to a lot of these "not forced but forced" shopping trips. This was like our 6th one of the trip so we were sick of them, and the dude kept following us like he was our shadow and kept telling us that we should stop learning Korean and learn Chinese because "It's so easy." I swear to god if one more person told me that Chinese was easy I was gonna flip out. So I actually found stuff I liked at this store, but was so put off by everything that I didn't want to buy anything. We got ready to leave, but our tour guide actually gave us money and insisted we go back in and buy something. We suspect they have some kind of deal and he wanted to keep up appearances and the relationship, but we were really upset by it. We felt like they were trying to rip us off at as many places as they could. 

They always looked hella sketchy too.

Salty about this, we went to our next event. This acrobatic show had been suggested by our tour guide and we had to pay extra, so we were not stoked.

Fortunately the show was awesome and more than made up for a lot of the weird stuff that happened.

Spinning wheel thing?

Dudes jumping through hoops.

There are like 10 people on this bike.

After the show we were taken to the train station and got ready for our overnight train to Xi'an.

For more on Beijing, check out Tina's blog here. For more pictures, see this album or this one.

Waiting for the train.

12 hours of this.

When we arrived in Xi'an we were again worried about being scammed, but our guide was there waiting. Jenny would be taking us around the next two days, and I honestly wish she had been our guide the whole time and/or we could be friends.

Xi'an digs

We went to the hotel to take advantage of the breakfast and get our stuff settled in. Tina and I had already changed because we thought we wouldn't go to the hotel, so we rested up and headed out for our favorite day of the trip.

We rode for over an hour to get to the Terracotta Warriors, Xi'an's most famous attraction, Jenny was unenthusiastic, as she has seen them countless times, but she said the look on her guests' faces was awesome so she kept doing it. I guess if you see them a lot (in high tourist season she goes 5 of 7 days a week when busy) over 4 years, you won't be excited. 

We stopped at a factory that reproduces them before we went to the actual museum. 

Facebook tagged the right side soldier as my dad. ^ this one is Ralph

Stoic

This was definitely the highlight of the trip.

In 1974 some farmers were digging a well and they came upon one of the heads. At first they were like "well this is China we find shit all the time" but after coming back to the site the soldier's head had changed color. The farmers thought the gods of the Underworld were displeased and freaked out. They called in more help and the rest is history.

The government came in and thus began one of the greatest finds in archaeology. Tina sums them up pretty well: "They are part of a huge tomb of Emperor Qin Shi Huang. The area stretches for 20+ miles and includes hundreds of pits. He ordered a massive army to be constructed to protect his tomb and his power, perhaps hoping he could carry the power beyond the grave. He ruled over a time of prosperity in China, but was also super brutal and ordered a lot of people killed."

There are thousands of these warriors. 3 pits are open to the public. A 4th has been discovered but it is empty. The various states of the pits suggests that the project was unfinished. Still, it's a huge discovery.

Now, I thought the warriors were found fully intact. Unfortunately this is not the case. They warriors all had weapons, and after this king died the dynasty didn't last much longer. A new emperor came and smashed the warriors (no good to have a large army symbolic of the last emperor, especially when the soldiers are of above-average height and build) and took the weapons. As a result, few weapons remained and few of the soldiers were whole.

Instead, archaeologists have been painstakingly reconstructing the soldiers. They can find pieces and determine their order, and put them back in their place once finished. Here is pit 1, the largest pit, where there are approximately 6,000 soldiers.

There were chariots, but they were made of wood and did not last. 

Some of the soldiers are missing heads but are whole for all intents and purposes, so they are allowed to be placed back in their order. Each soldier has markings to indicate rank, and no two faces are the same.

Chillin wit dis army yo

They are still excavating the soldiers and putting them back together. At the far end of pit 1 is the "hospital" where the soldiers are worked on. Once discovered, they are reconstructed and tagged to mark their spot.

Waiting in the hospital

If the missing pieces can't be found, however, they will stay there forever.

The one laying down has been that was for upwards of 10 years. He'll likely never return to his post

I found this all to be hauntingly sad. 

The emperor had a lot of people and his concubines buried alive with him, and then had this huge stone army protecting him. I find the whole thing incredibly poetic. A whole army buried, waiting to protect the emperor in life and death, and some of these soldiers will wait forever to be put back together, unable to take up their posts again. Tragically beautiful, right?

We had lunch, then moved on to the other pits. First, the 3rd pit. This one was a bit deeper and fancier than the first. pit 1 is the infantry, and pit 3 is more of the command center. A few hundred soldiers are here, and they have found all of the soldiers (I think). The heads in pit 1 were thought to be destroyed beyond repair or stolen. In pit 3, it is more likely that they were simply unfinished.

These aren't just infantry soldiers too.

Here we also learned something new: the soldiers were ornately painted and decorated.

Remember how the head changed color? Turns out the ground is a lot colder than the air and protects from pollution and aging. But the stuff is so old that when it is exposed to the air the color is ruined in a mere 20 minutes.

Original colors

Thus far there is no way to prevent this. But China is working on figuring it out.

After, we went to pit 2, which at first glance is as impressive as pit 1. But once you look inside, here's the view:

Nothing?

Pit 2 has yet to be excavated. Currently no work is being done on it except for small bits and pieces.

Why?

There are approximately 3,000 warriors waiting in the pit. It's such a shame that they are destroyed upon discovery, right? China is waiting until they can preserve the colors of the original design before they begin work in earnest on the second pit.

They did find some different soldiers, some of which are on display:

This is the crouched archer/crossbowman. See the color?

This is the only preserved color from the soldiers, and the method is only going to prevent the color loss for a little bit longer. It's not permanent.

He is thought to be very handsome, 

Next, a rare sight:

The horse has a saddle and bridle. The bridle is made of jade.

So if pit one was sad, pit two is even more so. Pit 1 is full of soldiers waiting to be fixed; pit two is waiting to be discovered. There was some work done to discover that the pit is more complicated than the first: there are more diverse soldiers, rarer ones, different formations, and more exciting things. But it's all hidden for now.

So much left undiscovered.

Some pieces have been tagged already

For now, very little is being done on pit 2. I hope that in my lifetime I can go back and see some originally restored soldiers, or see the completion of pit 1. Sigh.

It's so exciting to me that the pits can go from this:

to this:

I really, really loved this part of the trip. It was my favorite thing we saw. If we had only gone to Beijing, I'm afraid I would have been disappointed in China. But Xi'an was really incredible. 

After all of that exciting history, we had even more excitement for the evening. 

First, a huge dumpling buffet. We got to sample like 16 different kinds of dumplings.

'

Big fans. This duck dumpling is shaped like a duck.

Then we were treated to a Tang Dynasty show!

Sleeve dance, very popular at imperial court

Young girls returning from a spring outing and wishing for happiness

Mask dance

a depiction of the life of a maid in the palace

Harvesting dates

The next dance was my favorite. "Fairy Dance in Feathered Costume." Emperor XuanZong dreamed of touring a fairy palace on the moon. When he awoke, he wrote music for it.His favorite concubine Yang YuHuan then made a dance to the music.

So pretty!

And finale the finale!

The show was a delight to watch and we didn't want it to end!


For more on day one of Xi'an, check out my pictures here!

With our bellies full of dumplings, our heads filled with history, and our hearts filled with culture, we headed back to the hotel to rest and prepare for our final day in China.


Day 2 in Xi'an was less involved than day 1, but it was still cool. Xi'an was more what I expected China to be like, for better or for worse, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

We didn't have much to do and we had a late flight, so we actually got to sleep in. It was nice that we could treat this like a vacation too. Too often when we travel it's "go go go" from dawn til dusk, but with my ankle and our general lack of knowledge of China and Chinese, we were forced to slow it down a bit, which was nice.

Our first stop was the Grand Mosque.

Did you know that there's a sizable Muslim population in Xi'an? Me neither!

If you had taken me here on my own, I would have assumed it was a normal Chinese temple.

It was really cool to see! Mostly we talked about Islam and China and religion in general. I cannot stress enough how much I liked our tour guide Jenny. When some guys were taking pictures of us she went all "older sister" on them and scolded them for taking pictures of women without consent, and she stopped people on the street from stopping us to take pics. By this point we were sick of it, so it was nice.

Next we went to lunch, where we got to try some temple food.

I don't know what it is and Jenny didn't either. 

After lunch we went to the Wild Goose Pagoda, a big Buddhist temple in Xi'an.

We learned a lot about Buddha and his disciples. We even saw his life story carved in jade:

Pretty cool!

The temple is famous too because one of the followers of Buddhism had some questions so he traveled all the way to India and brought back some original documents and translated them from Sanskrit. The pagoda actually got knocked a bit off-kilter due to an earthquake, so it leans to the west and incidentally towards India. Since he never got to go back to India, some people think it's his spirit longing to go back to Buddhism's origins. Cool stuff.

Our last stop was the Shaanzi Museum (the province Xi'an is the capitol of) for one last bit of Chinese history.

This lion was found outside the tomb of China's only Empress who thought women were just as capable as men. yassss!

Terracotta faces. None of them are the same.

They had a Terracotta display featuring other kinds of things besides the warriors, though they had a lot of them too.

Armor

China thinks this is a unicorn.

Prancy horse

Foreigner. Obviously.

We spent a while in the museum, but honestly I was pottery and history-ed out by the end. It was a lot to take in in one trip.

We didn't have anything else planned, so we headed to the airport for our journey home. We said goodbye to Jenny, who was awesome, and then waited for our flight. My cast got swabbed for a bomb check, but it was the only time that was checked. We couldn't use credit cards in most places either??? It was weird.

In Shanghai we had an overnight layover and originally we had planned to stay in the airport for free like in Osaka, but our experience in China led us to be a bit uncomfortable with how conspicuous we were. We went to the in-airport hotel and spent about 6 hours there, and it was perhaps the best decision of the trip. We were rested and safe for our flight in the morning.

A short flight from Shanghai brought us home to Seoul. We caught up on tv and relaxed. And now we are ready for the new year to begin!

For another view on our trip to Xi'an, check out what Tina had to say here and check out more pictures here!

China was a whirlwind of confusion, excitement, frustration, amazement, and everything in between. I'm so glad I went and got to experience it. It was so incredible and I can't believe I went! Many ups and downs later, I'm so stoked that I got to go. Thanks for the help and inspiration, Mom and Dad!


On to the next adventure!