empty time: Xi'an

The train to Xi'an was, miraculously, a day train. In some ways, much better, though it meant I couldn't stretch out or anything. There was a lot of staring and "subtle" picture taking, but what's new.
(We, on the other hand, were amused by the Chinese methods of cramming luggage onto the racks)

Vincent became like a main attraction every time he stood up. The whole car would all gather to see what the really tall guy was up to. At one point, when buying some lunch from the lunch cart, there was a whole ordeal that turned out to be simply the lunch man wanted an American dollar instead of the local currency. People from the next car over were even looking in to see what was up.

We arrived finally about 8:30 in Xi'an, and immediately whisked off to the hotel. The next day our tour guide "Tina"--my god, tina was something else--took us out to the Terra Cotta Warriors. (Or the "Turra Cotta Wurrier Musum" as Tina would put it. You might think I'm being mean for making fun of Tina, but you have no idea how annoying this woman was. You'd think we were all baby sheep the way she had to herd us around, non-stop talking, and she only had one volume--loud. Just when you wanted to wander to go look at something, she'd appear out of nowhere like some kind of awful tour guide witch and wouldn't let you leave. She wouldn't even let us pee alone. "Together, we toilet." She was utterly exhausting.)

In any case, the Warriors. They were... farther away than I expected, so thank goodness for telephotos. This was the one time I managed to sneak away from Tina, which was probably due to the fact that it was our first trip. In any case, I breezed through the 4 buildings in a cool 30 minutes, and then had to wait like an hour for everyone else to finish.