Long Vacation: Day 9

Worst. Night. Ever. But we made it!

Can you blame us for eating breakfast and going straight up to our rooms and sleeping after a night like that? You shouldn’t. Those puffy white sheets, the wooden bunk beds, oh it was Heaven :) We woke up at noon and rode a long series of buses for two-ish hours to see the terra cotta warriors. I was excited to go (but not too hugely) but boy oh boy they over-exceeded my expectations by about 250%. I hadn't expected to geek out as much as I did!

Long story short, one of the Ming emperors was either nervous about the after-life and wanted to feel protected or he thought that his possessions would go with him so he had statues of his army made. Pretty daunting task! All of this was barely found in the seventies!


See for yourself:)


Pit 3, maybe. If you ever go see the terra cotta warriors visit the pits in backwards order because 1 is the most impressive!



Go terra cotta!



Pit 2. Generals and other high-ranked guys



Terra cotta warriors?



My Olympic fixation reaches new heights—a real torch from the Beijing 2008 games!



Pit 1, the biggest and most impressive. The room is as big as an airplane hangar, and I don’t remember how many warriors are in there but there are a lot. They are still being excavated today. Pretty cool :)


Lovin’ the zoom on my Christmas present? Oh yes! Thanks, Dad and Mom :)


Isn’t the detail amazing?? Every warrior is completely unique, even down to the treading on the soles of their shoes.




We rode a bus back to the hostel and by this time I was definitely vacationed out. The sights of the Beijing vacation are amazing but they are tiring- a lot of walking and transportation catastrophes and I’d been fighting a cold all week that I just couldn’t shake. I was more than content going back to the hostel and just chilling for the rest of the night. Some hostels have activities every night and it just so happened that the activity that night was a karaoke/open-mic night of sorts. There was girl playing guitar and singing named Journey from..somewhere that I don’t remember, but she’d been staying at the hostel for a long period of time but was continuing her travels soon. She sang a couple songs, some in Chinese, others in Korean and some in English. It was just the most relaxing atmosphere, listening to music, Shaw was playing some bongos they had there, as people from all over the world checked into the hostel and just contently swaying to the music.

She asked if anyone would sing and somehow I ended up singing “Stand By Me” pretty nastily through my cold but it was worth it when I got a plate full of fresh red strawberries as “payment” for participating. But I jammed with some Chinese people at a hostel in front of people from all over the world. Haha wow! It was such a wonderfully content night. Oh and did I mention there’s a hostel dog?? A brown labradoodle named Teddy..

I fell in love with the curls!! What a cutie ;) I wanted to bring him home!



Tiffany and I were hiding from Shaw. We were almost invisible.

A relaxing evening to end a really awesome day:)