Sept 11

First day of rain so I'm sitting in a Starbucks (only place I could find wifi in this city!!) in the centre of Xian, the capital of the Shaanxi province (and according to some, China's true capital). Yesterday we visited the amazing Terracotta Army. We eventually got there after an hour and a half detour to the "terracotta warrior factory" (basically a shopping mall that the chinese tourist agency forces all tours to go to before you get to go to the actual warriors). It was a rather amazing sight as you entered the biggest pit (where most of the warriors were found) and its hard to comprehend that all this was done over 2000 yrs ago and it was designed (very carefully) never to be found. However, all I could think about walking through it was how absolutely terrified this Qin Shi Huang (the first emperor of a unified China) was of dying. He actually died on a journey to the east coast seeking a legendary island of the immortals and the secret drug of longevity they supposedly had... and at the same time he had 700,000 people (most of whom were killed post completion to protect the secret) working to build an underground city and army that was to follow him and protect him in the after-life.

Other than that Xian also offers a pretty cool, and surprisingly calm and quiet (yes, we're back in crazy busy congested and polluted cities) Great Mosque, in the middle of the Muslim Quarters (where you could buy some pretty scary looking food and copies of everything you could ever need).

This morning Caitlin (room mate and cop from Aus) and I went on a great bike ride on top of the longest (14km) city wall in China, it was a great start to the day and we were on our own up there for most of the 1hr 40min ride. Towards the end, we proved to be great entertainment to the Chinese tourists that were going around the wall in a little golf cart... they were waving at us and taking photographs. Another wonder of this country.

This afternoon we're off to Luoyang, which is really just a stop-over to get us to the Shaolin temple (the first Buddhist temple in China, but also, apparently, the birthplace of Kung Fu -- another typical contradiction of this strange, but interesting, country).