Xian

Day 14

We were supposed to see the terra cotta warriors today but last night our flight was delayed until 1:20AM, didn't board until after that, then we had the flight itself and a long ride from the airport to the hotel, so by the time we checked in it was 4:30 in the morning. Nobody was feeling ready for a two hour trip in each direction. Instead we slept in.

Ray and Donna had seen the Warriors the day before and showed us pictures. I was disappointed but Andrea had wanted to cut the warriors from the itinerary anyway. In fact, it was the only item on the trip that I had insisting on. Andrea joked that as long as we'd seen the pictures we could pretend that we've seen it.

Andrea and I woke up to people being noisy in the hallway outside our hotel room at 9:00AM, giving me a luxurious four and a half hours of sleep. The Chinese often see people behaving boisterously and say "they are free." I heard it about the rowdy audience at the Guangzhou Opera House and several times about my own children as they sang, danced, and kibitzed. I have resisted any temptation to discuss the difference between the ability to be loud and real freedom.

We dressed, tried to wake the kids, managed to get Zachary, and met Donna and Ray in the lobby. We ate next door: black rice porridge, a scallion crepe filed with undercooked shredded potato and another crepe with leek and egg. Zachary got scallion pancakes but took two third of it to his brothers.

After breakfast we toured the Wild Goose Pagoda compound, which had a working Buddhist monastery, and a variety of Buddhist and Taoist shrines, including one that depicted Budas life carved in jade on three walls and buildings with large golden statues of Buda, his disciples, and the Taoist god of money. It was an odd juxtaposition, Buda calling greed one of the three evils in a story carved in jade and a God of money and fortune to worship just across the courtyard.

The legend behind the Pagoda was that there are two groups of Buddhists, one that ate meat and another that was vegetarian. The meat eaters saw a flock of geese overhead, thought about how they had no meat, asked God for meat, and one of the geese immediately fell out of the sky with a broken wing. This made the group that age meat decide to become vegetarians too.

After the temple we ate lobby in a food court. I ordered nothing, just having the kids leftover green beans, dumplings, and red bean smoothie.

We went back to the hotel where Andrea and Donna exercised while the kids played video games at the mall. Li Feng, Evan, and I hung in the room and I caught posting to this blog up to yesterday.

After the kids returned we checked out, jammed ourselves and our suitcases into a van, and headed for the train station. We bought dinner from street vendors. Joshua was very happy with his fried vegetable sandwich, which he declared the best sandwich he had eaten in his entire life.

We're taking the sleeper train to Chengdu. Each car has three levels of thin bunks. There was much discussion amongst members of my family about the frequency with which the bedding was laundered and the provenance of various stains. Lights out is 10pm.

Everything we asked of the kids was an argument this evening. Joshua was apoplectic when Andrea said no to a second sandwich, Ari would not take no for an answer when told not to go into the station without us or when told not to climb on the luggage racks in the train. Joshua would not defer plugging his phone in to charge until after helping get the luggage up. They wouldn't calm down and stop being giddy which made the evening very hard.

Lights out was at 10 pm and with earplugs I fell asleep almost instantly, once Joshua stopped fussing with his cell charger. I woke at 4am, nose stuffed, and lay in bed for a while thinking about photoshoots before finishing this entry and reading a bit more of The Goldfinch. I went back to sleep around 5 until the noises of people waking up woke me again at 6:20AM.