I'm really not the Antiblogger! I think that title belongs to Dave.

Anyway, since I last posted, I have gone to Xi'an and again to Shanghai, and my host mom ripped a leg off of their pet cricket, and I have a passport again and have visited a church here.

Xi'an was fun; I saw the Terracotta Soldiers in all their unearthed and reconstructed glory, and I saw a Great Muslim Mosque from centuries past, and I saw the Big Goose Pagoda, and I saw some big tomb thingy, and assorted other goodies. I shall now indulge you with pictures, in no particular order.


This is the Big Goose Pagoda; in the bottom right corner you can see my fellow waiguoren (foreigners). We accidentally went to the Little Goose Pagoda first and felt very silly. It was not nearly so impressive, mainly because we couldn't see it behind the park walls. I didn't get to stay near the Big Goose Pagoda for very long, unfortunately, because I had to go back to the hostel to pick up my things and catch my train back to Nanjing.
This was at that tomb place (the Yangling Mausoleum of Emperor Jindi of the Western Han Dynasty, or so this little booklet I got there says). The actual mausoleum was under a big manmade hill, but that just looks like a big hill, so I decided to post a picture of this building, which is an exhibition hall for the outer storepits of the mausoleum. It was protecting some sort of large earthen structure which I suppose was the storepit; at any rate, I enjoyed the largeness and openness inside.

This is what the inside of the mausoleum looked like (actually, this may have been the inside of one of the storepits - it wasn't always clear what was what). These little guys were kind of like the Terracotta soldiers, except small, and without arms. And the were scattered around sort of like corpses. There were also numerous animals (livestock and such), along with weapons and vehicles and other exciting things that were buried here.


Intermission: The Chinese have a different conception of "take-out".


And now on to the Great Mosque! I took a lot of pictures here because the architecture was really cool, but I kept getting white people in all the pictures, like this one. Every time I saw a white person I felt like a tourist. Actually I felt like a tourist a lot of the time while I was in Xi'an, which made the whole experience considerably less enjoyable (Muslims continue to worship at this mosque, as well, which made me a little uncomfortable to be waltzing in taking pictures).


Last in my photos from Xi'an, the Terracotta Soldiers. Yep, there really are a lot of them. The Chinese have yet to finish excavating this site, but they estimate this pit (pit 1) to have about 6000 terracotta soldiers. They don't unearth them in such neat rows and standing and all put together; usually the soldiers have been broken into pieces and are all kind of mashed up, so it's very time consuming to put them together. But hey, when your country has 1.3 billion people, there's always someone with the time.

I liked the eerie green of this picture. I like to imagine that when there's no one around, everything gets an eerie green light, because that would be more interesting. However, I'm pretty sure there's always someone around.

I figure this has to be a long-forgotten relative of Joyce's (or rather, the cast of one).

The cricket story isn't interesting enough to warrant a full explanation, but suffice to say: the cricket got out of its cage. My host mom stuffed in back in, knocked off a leg in the process, and then commented "it doesn't need it anyway" and threw the leg out the window.

Church was interesting. I didn't understand most of what people were saying, but Esther gave me a brief runthrough of Chinese Christianese before I left, so I wasn't completely clueless. I did feel a little awkward when they seated me in the front pew, because I swear everyone there was extra short. I must have been at least a foot taller than everyone. Oh, and Dad - the Chinese sleep through sermons too.