Bye Bye China

So now that I am finally out of china’s stupid ban on anything that remotely relates to freedom of speech I can post again. So I have a lot of pictures to put on here, so I will probably just put them in a separate post.

My definite favourite has to be the china wall. For one I felt like I was home back in the mountains (although they were bigger than my own mountains) and second it was absolutely breath-taking there. The combination of the outstanding beauty and the overwhelming realisation that this wall had stood for over 2500 years! The thought that people had to haul those rocks up the incredibly steep, almost sheer in some places, mountains. It blows your mind! Ohh and just so you know, however steep the wall looks in the pictures…. Its steeper! It really is. It was soo steep! The part of the wall I climbed ranged from guardhouse 1-23. The last two were up a very steep climb that when we got to (we being two British friends of mine Hattie and Emily, and myself) we decided that guardhouse number 21 was far enough to go and turned around (we got a cable car up at 14 and walked to 21 then back to 6 for a toboggan down weeeeeeeeeeee).

My next favourite thing was the terracotta army in Xi’an. It is a really eerie place!

When I was taking photos I kept expecting to catch one of them in movement or to look up and see that one was looking at me. There was also this great air of expectation. Like they were waiting for something that hadn’t come yet. No wonder so many fantasy novels are wrote about them. The air there is very weighted, and extremely unnerving. Now time for some facts... that you may or may not have known

1. There are about 8000 warriors. Only 2000 have been unearthed. The rest are kept sealed so as to not break them when the air comes rushing in and also because they are all painted and the lacquer falls off in contact to the air.

2. They all have different faces. Not one face is the same. They also range from 1.7-2 metres tall. Which is very tall compared to the ancient Chinese.

3. They were never written about in any of the scripts or scrolls that we know of. They were only found by accident because china had a draught and a farmer was digging for irrigation wells. This is the only reason they have been found. We could have gone years without knowing of their existence. I find this soo bizarre.

4. The last point, whilst not exactly about the warriors it is pertaining to it. The emperor’s tomb, which lies around a mile away from the site, has never been opened. This is because with today’s technology it is impossible to open the tomb and not destroy the goods within there. There will be paintings and coloured ceramics that like the warriors will fade on contact with the air.

Suzhou was probably my next favourite place. It was a small town that has many canals and is called the Venice of the east. It was very pretty and it had many Chinese gardens. I absolutely loved the garden! It was so tranquil! I could have spent all day in there. As I was I spent an hour at least over our given hour and a half there. The only reason I left was the call of food. The garden was called garden of the master of the nets and it was named after a fisherman who saved a nobleman’s daughter, I think. It was only small but it was so beautiful.

My least favourite was shanghaied. I loved old town that had loads of old style houses and streets with the sloped roofs and it had ponds with turtles and koi in it. It also had lots of shops. So if you have a souvenir, this is probably where I got it from ha-ha.

I really wasn’t impressed with the Forbidden City either. It was large. But much of the area was covered with grey stones as the emperor did not allow anything natural in the palace because he had to be the Supreme Being (hence the reason everything was paved). And the buildings where pretty but once you seen one of the beautiful rectangular buildings with the sloped roof and the green blue and gold patterns on the wooden beams, you had seen the rest of them. You could not go inside the buildings, and I couldn’t get any decent pictures either as Beijing had a constant smog filling the air. So all in all, it wasn’t great.

Now for other little titbits of information. I had a lovely tour group. There were only 3 people from the UK including myself and my roomie was Norwegian, and so I became aware of how ignorant I was to their history. Her name was Solveign, and the easiest way I can explain saying her name is Sool-Vi (Vi as in viper). And she said her name means sunshine, or sunny. A beautiful name. But hard to shorten to anything when you try and get her attention in a crowd. We also had 6 Aussies, 3 Mexicans and 2 Swiss. There was 1 Aussie, who although I’m sure didn’t mean to be was very rude and insolent. I spoke to her about the great wall and she said that  she climbed to the top and she got to where there are signs saying go no further and she went passed those. She said the only reason she turned around was because the German she had picked up on the way decided the wall was no longer safe enough for him to walk on! I couldn’t believe it this 65+ woman was sitting there telling me she had ignored all these signs and blundered into danger! It’s so disrespectful! And rude! And stupid!