Face to Terracotta Face

6/23

Busy day.  I decided to go on a tour to see the Terracotta Warriors after much internal debate because it would've cost me at least 80 yuan (and I don't know if I've explained this, but RMB/yuan/kwai are all the same value, it's the equivalent of USD/dollar/buck or GBP/pound/quid) to go by myself and the tour was 190, but that included lunch, an English tour guide, an air-conditioned van to get me there and a stop at the Temple of the Eight Immortals (the royal temple in Xi'an).  As it turned out, the tour was an excellent decision, mostly due to our wonderful guide, Jaija.

Jaija, whose name I remember because she said we could call her Lady Ja Ja, spoke very good English with an understandable accent and was very knowledgeable.  Just as importantly, however, she was fun.  She was adorable, really, and happy and excited the whole time and managed to unite our group and really bring us out.

The terracotta warriors were impressive, but didn't wow me as expected.  They were cool and I was glad I'd gone but I guess I felt like seeing them in person wasn't really that much more exciting than seeing photographs of them.  Some of the details were quite impressive though, and the number itself (8,000 total, not all visible or reconstructed yet) was astonishing.  I do want to tell you a bit about the man who ordered them built though, as he's quite fascinating- my favorite Chinese historical figure so far besides Empress Xixi.

Emperor Qin ascended the throne as King of the State of Qin at age 13, and in the year 221 B.C., he unified China, which he ruled for eleven years, until he died at 49, completely insane at the end.  In that time, he became the first Emperor of China by ruthlessly uniting the warring provinces, started the construction of, and completed the first section of, the Great Wall, built most of the terracotta army and drank mercury every day.

The mercury was supposed to make him immortal and a river of mercury still runs inside his mountain tomb 1.5 km away from the warriors, which is why it's not open to visit.  He believed that the mercury would allow him to have a sort of afterlife and the warriors were there to protect/fight for him during said afterlife.  They were never supposed to be uncovered.

I'm sure you know that what makes the terracotta warriors so special is the fact that all of the faces are unique but you may not know that they were modeled after real workers at the time.  The paid for their artistic immortality with their mortal lives as the Emperor didn't want anyone making copies.

If you'd like to see a very good and truly aesthetic movie about China, the uniting of China and Emperor Qin, I highly recommend watching Hero with Jet Li.  Great movie, and from what I've seen, it does a good job of showing the different landscapes of China.

Also, random, but did you know Mulan was based on a true story?

So, it was neat.  The lunch was absolute crap and the temple was not particularly special, though they had a bunch of peacocks and I thought it was funny that they had six male peacocks for the single peahen.

I guess I just had some extra energy and was afraid I wouldn't have another chance to, but I decided this evening would be a good time to do my bike ride on the city wall.  I knew it was 40RMB to get in, though only 20 with my student ID) and another 20 to rent the bicycle.  Unfortunately, no one had bothered to tell me (of the several people I'd spoken to about it) that a 200RMB deposit was required and that the woman renting them was going to be a heinous bitch about it.  I curse a bit regularly, but I try to keep this blog pretty clean but this woman was so awful I wanted to throttle her.  I only had 100 on me for the deposit (besides the 20 for the rental) so I offered her my student ID and my debit card as a deposit in addition to the 100.  She said she couldn't take it and refused to look at me and started helping someone else.  The customer service here is awful in general and they are terribly rude and dismissive like that commonly but this witch was even more so.

Sometimes, things are impossible due to language difficulties.  I get that and am always willing to pay for mistakes due to that since I'm the one who doesn't speak the language properly.  Sometimes, things are impossible due to crap/ unfair company policies which the person can't change.  I get that too, and try not to get angry or be rude to the representative who has no say in the policies they're required to enforce.

Neither was the case here.  The woman was just being a bitch because she could and she felt like it (and incidentally, the second is virtually never the case in China) when I'd been very polite but was obviously desperate as the only reason I'd paid the entrance fee to do this.  She wouldn't help me at all and it was the only place I could see where I could rent a bicycle so I couldn't just go somewhere else (though I later saw that there was another place to do so on the other side, but run by the same company).  When it became clear that she wasn't going to help me and was pretending her English was significantly less than it was, I got pissed and went downstairs.  I explained to the guard that since I couldn't rent a bicycle, I wanted a refund because I didn't want to see any of it except by bike.  He got his manager and she said that it would be fine with my debit card, and later, that it would be fine with just 100 deposit.  She radioed someone and said I could go back up to the wall and it would be okay.

It wasn't.  The same awful woman still said I couldn't (and admittedly, I was being quite rude back at this point) and refused to help me in any way, or even look at me.  I grabbed the radio, assuming that if I said something the manager (of the wall, I should explain, not of the company renting the bikes) would come up and help me so I said "Hello, no one is helping me at all up here," and heard nothing back.  I went over to a group of men who also worked for the company and said I wanted to speak to the boss and they said the woman was the boss.  I told them I just wanted to rent a bike but only had 100, and one of the men said I could.  I told him that she wouldn't let me and he went around and made her take it.  Finally.  The entire ordeal took over 30 minutes and was incredibly frustrating, even more so when someone later told me they'd only had to deposit 200 total for three people.  I don't know what that woman's problem was.  I really was very nice at the beginning and she just decided to screw with my head for no reason.  Also, this is a good example of a time when I am willing to make a big deal of something and argue it because I was being screwed over for absolutely no logical reason whatsoever (like one of the two listed above).

It really did ruin the entire experience for me.  I was so upset.  You can say I shouldn't have let it bother me so much, but screw you, it did and I did let it.  It also just wasn't that fun or exciting in general.  Yes, it was cool to ride a bike on top of a huge city wall, but the scenery wasn't diverse, interesting or pretty, it was just boring and repetitive.

Upon returning my bike after the 20-30 km ride, the bitch told me "You're over-time."  I sure as hell was not.  It was 8:30 on the dot, the time they closed, and I was supposed to have it for 100 minutes up until then, which I would've had if she hadn't delayed me for 30 at the beginning.  As it was, I'd only had it for about 75.  So no, I definitely wasn't.  I grabbed my 100 that she put down on the table, not even handing it to me, and told her "Screw you, you stupid bitch," and stormed off.  And no, I'm not the slightest bit ashamed of what I said and I think she deserved that and more.

Eventually I calmed down- my daily free beer from the hostel bar helped, and started talking to a group of people who gave me a free beer because they somehow had many extras, like four per person at the table.  We started to play Kings, drank for quite a while longer and then went down to the bar to watch the World Cup games.  England was playing Slovenia at the same time the U.S. was playing Algeria and both England and the U.S. needed decisive victories to continue onto the next round.  The bar was only playing England's game, which sucked, but I wasn't going to make any really serious effort to watch it somewhere else so I watched that.  Halfway through the game, a group of Americans convinced the bartenders to switch one of the tvs to the U.S. game.  I didn't realize this until a bit later, but still soon enough to join them to watch Landon Donovan score an awesome goal.  It was really fun to watch in a bar with so many people so excited about the games.  Both the U.S. and England won their games, 1-0 and as there weren't many (any?) Slovenians or Algerians at the hostel, everyone was happy and excited. 

With the group of Americans, and at least one English girl and two English guys, we decided to continue drinking somewhere else.  We ended up as a club, whose English name was "Club," and after drinking lots more, including more beer and more of the gratis Jaeger and Red Bull type mix the Chinese love to give us foreigners, and talking to a bunch more random people, some who spoke English and some who didn't,  I eventually got home and went to bed, drunk, but not too much so.