Warriors with Dumplings

Found them…..the Terracotta Army that is. Hard to miss really (well apart from the fact they were underground). All 11000 of them plus horses, carriages and a whole host of stuff the Chinese haven’t dug up yet.

 

I tell you, Indiana Jones, The Mummy and Sinbad the Sailor have nothing on this lot. They look just like they will start stomping along just as soon as some bad guy presses the button! There are rows of them in just about one piece but the ones with holes in and limbs missing and heads missing etc are a bit freaky. There is one that is just two feet standing there.

 

Phenomenal to think they were all painted bright colours as well – I didn’t know that. They even went to the detail of putting tread on the guys shoes – there is a kneeling archer and you can see the sole of his foot, his shoe had tread marks on it. 11000 hand made models and they are putting tread marks on shoes. Wow!

 

And they were chrome plating their swords and they cast the most magnificent (if small – well smaller than we were expecting anyway) horse and carriage out of bronze.

 

Breakfast yummy today – proper toast and jam that tasted of jam not runny sugar water (mind you it had come all the way from Austria in its little packets which was a little distressing on the carbon footprint level). Proper bacon as well. Wooops. Allowed though as no lunch so it was left over snacks for us, oh and a packet of mini shortbread biscuits we bought at our tea tasting ceremony. Very useful on two counts – one was lunch, the other was to take away the taste of the tea! We tried Lychee Black tea – this was the winner. Then Dragon Well tea, Ginseng Oolong tea (which should have an aftertaste of liquorice but Martyn said not – although I think he’s damaged his taste buds with his salt liquorice) and finally Ku Ding tea. Fortunately for me the tasting cups were very small and it was perfectly acceptable to throw away the bits you didn’t like into the servers little draining board!! Personally I preferred the little Buddha and pig models the lady had that changed colour when she poured the hot waste water over them but I did my best to focus on the tea!

 

Back to hotel for a quick nap. Well that’s what everyone else did. We went for a walk down the road – Martyn found a gadget shop. To be honest I think he spent longer looking at the gas burners and wok attachments than at the gadgets but at least I wasn’t subjected to the freezers and washing machines floor. They had a dehumidifier that had two goldfish in it. I thought you had to empty the water out of dehumidifiers. What would happen to the poor fish?

 

And then dinner – dumpling banquet. Well we compromised as we weren’t sure we all wanted an entire meal of dumplings so we had ordinary food for 5 and two dumpling banquets which was good as we all got to try a bit of everything. Followed by birthday cake for Lucy and Happy Birthday song over the loudspeakers and applause from everyone else in the restaurant as well. Very nice for her but we were very glad we had our cake in a much smaller restaurant with no speaker system!

 

Then everyone else went back to bed and Martyn and I stayed out – ‘what’ I hear you say. Martyn and Kay having a night on the town whilst everyone else is tucked up in bed. What is the world coming to????? Well, we just figured we’d come all this way and we were not going to miss out. If we can stay awake through The Nutcracker ballet in Russia after a night train we can stay awake for this. We watched the Tang Dynasty Show – lots of beautiful costumes and great dancing with some traditional Chinese musical instruments. It was very good.

 

And then, hello pillow!