Tuesday 12th October
Urrggghh how crappy do I feel this morning? We were all up until gone midnight last night drinking with some Swedish and polish girls in the hostel. Tyler was in his element with his "hello ladies" t-shirt on (a present from our friends in cranfield). He literally showed it to every woman we passed throughout the day and has built up a vast array of stories to woo all of the girls he meets.
We had gone to see the terracotta army and the tour guide (ja ja) took a particular shine to him, grabbing his arm at every opportunity to drag him off to different parts of the complex. The place was really cool, far larger than I had imagined and it seems that they haven't really started to survey the area yet so don't really have any idea of what else is buried there.
There are currently 4 known pits that have a range of finds buried within them, the unexcevated portions had an array of arms, legs, heads and horse butts just waiting for someone to free them from their shallow graves. We sniggered away at the horse butts (I believe this is customary and we wanted to fit in) before heading off to the main pit 1 which has some 2000 warriors that have been unearthed.
The guy who discovered the first warrior was a local farmer and the government paid him 10 Yuan for his discovery (approximately 1 pound), however since then he has made a fortune from the place. We had the privilege to meet him as he was signing books in the shop and I have to say he is a grumpy old bastard. I guess having spent the last 20 odd years sitting in a souvenir shop has taken it's toll on the old codger but still a smile wouldn't go amiss every now and again.
Still we diligently brought his books and he dutifully signed away, for all I know it could have said "I bloody hate tourists" and he had a glint in his eye that indicated a desire for us to bugger off as fast as possible.
For lunch we were treated to the culinary delights of the local tourist shit hole that seemed to have a speciality for grime coated table wear and little else. We quickly wolfed down as much mystery meat and neon cabbage as possible before being herded into the adjoining rip off market so that we could spend our ha rd earned tourist dollars on yet more one of a kind tat.
My negotiating skills seemed to have been honed a little since my last encounter and I actually managed to knock a merchant down from120 Yuan to 40 for a fat buddha head that was probably worth 20.
With a lingering taste of MSG in our mouths from our lunch banquet we figured the best bet would be to drink our way through it as soon as we got back to the hostel (one of the few things that has actually gone to plan thus far).
So today has been a bit of a wipe out, we needed to get our train tickets sorted for our next destination and asked the hostel owner for advice, he quickly drew out a detailed map to the local ticket office about five minutes away. 2 hours later we started to consider the possibility that we may have taken a wrong turn somewhere along the line, we had found a little booth that purportedly did sell tickets but the fat angry man contained within just pointed us in the direction we had just come from and couldn't offer any assistance.
So it was that 3 hours after we had originally set out on our 10 minute round trip we wound up back at our hostel with our tails between our legs acting like dumb foreigners and asking for help. This is the good bit, it turns out the hostel worker that gave us directions sent us to the wrong place, ohh how we all laughed, so much merriment ensued that nobody could register the tears welling up in my eyes or the fact that my arms seemed to have a craving to be firmly coiled around his neck.
Still after all of this entertainment, what we needed now was a nice walk in the opposite direction down the same street to find the tickets again, ohh yeah also I forgot to mention that it was absolutely bucketing it down. It's been the first day of rain since we set off but it was relentless.
We finally secured three tickets for tomorrow afternoon and meandered around the main square for a bit, we were soaked through and saw no point of heading back to the hostel because of the safety concerns (there was still a strong possibility I may actually strangle someone)
We headed down to the Muslim quarter for some food with one of the girls we had met, mini was from the US and spoke mandarin, although considering the place we ended up in that offered very little help to her. We ended up with a rather delightful dish called Acidbot Bingy soup, none of us had any idea what the hell it was but it tasted great. We had loads of other dishes with less cool names and for the 4 of us the bill came to just over £5, it just seems to be getting cheaper and cheaper here.
Right off to bed for an early night and hopefully a lay in although highly doubtful with a 7 year old in the same room.
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