Thursday, June 27 - The Terracotta Warriors

We took a walk in Xi'an near our hotel after breakfast this morning.  It is much cooler here than in Beijing and was grey and drizzling this morning.  TongJie said that it reminded him of Seattle.  We found a department store called Vanguard and bought some books and let the boys pick out a snack for the bus ride today.  We met up with our group at 10:00 and went on the bus to see the Terracotta Warriors, about an hour outside of Xian.  It was nice that it wasn't so hot, and also we were mostly indoors in the museum.  It was crowded, but nothing like yesterday at the Forbidden City and Tianenmen Square.  I took a different bag today and forgot to transfer Ezekiel's monocular into it, but today would have been a good day for him to use it since it wasn't so bright.  He didn't seem to be too bothered about not seeing things today, and was excited to see all the terracotta horses (his favorite!), and seemed to think everything must be a horse, or part of a horse that had yet to be put together.  The Emporer Qin had the terracotta army sculpted from red clay around 2,000 years ago to guard his tomb after he died.  It was discovered in the 1970s by a farmer digging a well and since then, thousands of soldier and horse statues have been unearthed.  I didn't realize how much excavation is still being done at the site even today, and it was interesting to see many pieces still in the process of being put together like life-sized puzzles.  Another interesting thing I did not realize was how close to the edge of the whole thing was the well that was being dug - if the well would have been just a few meters in a different direction, the entire army of terracotta soldiers might still be underground and completely undiscovered!  We went to a small factory of sorts that makes replicas of the terracotta army out of the same red clay and in various sizes.  We let the boys each choose a small one as a souveneir.  TongJie chose a warrior and Ezekiel chose a horse, they're really neat!  It was hard to explain to Ezekiel about the terracotta warriors - he kept getting confused and thinking they were real people who had died.  The replica souveneirs added another layer of confusion for him - if these were replicas, he thought they should be replicas of a real person (or horse), so he kept asking me if the terracotta warriors were "real."

We had a very late lunch (or early dinner?) with our group before heading back to the hotel.  This hotel has a swimming pool, so as soon as we got back to our room the boys wanted to go swimming.  A few of the other families had the same idea, and TongJie and Ezekiel had a good time in the pool, and then crashed and were sound asleep within minutes of brushing their teeth when we got back to our room.

It has been a lot of fun getting to know the other families in our group, and even though our boys are the youngest by far, they are having a great time hanging out with they others, and everybody has been super kind and friendly to our boys.  I think TongJie especially really feels like he fits in with the group and a lot of times has been choosing to be with the other kids instead of with me and Jeff all the time, which is quite something if you know TongJie.  I don't know if we were quite prepared for how long each day was going to be on this trip - every day so far has been packed with sightseeing and touristy things, which has been really interesting but probably a little above the attention span of our boys.  They would prefer to have a little more down time to just play with their cars and stuffed animals in our hotel room, walk to parks, and swim in the pool, but overall they are taking these long days in stride very, very well.  So far, at least . . . we'll see how we are all doing by the end of our trip!