Just getting to Xi'an turned out to be adventure enough as, despite arranging to meet at the school nearly two hours before our bus was due to leave, a sudden and inexplicable lack of taxis meant we very nearly didn't make it. I was in the first taxi which, due to the impossible gridlock around the stations, dropped us off in the middle of the road to scramble past cars and over the fence dividing the road (even harder when carrying a packed 60L rucksack, not that the traffic warden filming our struggles seemed to sympathise) to get to to the bus station. It was absolutely crammed: September 30th is National Day, so the whole of China is on the move to visit family or go travelling in their holiday. The six of us who'd been in the first two taxis managed to bump into each other outside the station with time to spare, but the third taxi, which hadn't left until nearly 20 minutes after the first, was still trapped in traffic who knew how far away. Knowing that, if they missed the bus, the three volunteers in the last taxi would have no chance of getting to Xi'an, those of us who were already there set about waylaying the bus until they arrived. The first 10 minutes weren't too bad: Mary, Tessa, Patrick and I refused to take our seats on the bus; Mary and I explained to the driver that our three friends were coming, were running, wouldn't be long... and the hilarity of our Chinese seemed to compensate for the inconvenience of a delayed departure, so the bus staff let us wait quite happily. They became increasingly more annoyed throughout the next ten minutes though. Patrick stood in the door of the bus, Mary and I took shifts pacing about anxiously and faking worried phone calls, we all apologised lots and looked upset, we promised the English-speaker dragged over to harangue us that our friends would only be two minutes (lies), Tessa made herself cry and somehow we managed to keep everything waiting. The last 5 minutes were even worse: we knew we couldn't drag it out much longer, especially after Nicole came down the bus to tell us that everyone on board was getting pissed off and she thought they might go without us soon. We ranged ourselves against the windows of the station, scouring the crowds for the late volunteers (which conveniently also meant that we could avoid eye contact with the bus drivers) and thankfully it wasn't much longer before they arrived! I really don't know how much longer we could have held the bus for - I think we were already reaching the point where we could board or be left - but luckily we got away with it, and I'm actually quite proud that we managed to delay the bus for so long. I wasn't so proud when I finally got on the bus and had to do the walk of shame up the aisle though. Normally I'd have tried to chat to the guy next to me, but that time I was too embarrassed to do anything but plug my iPod in and try to sleep.

We'd all tried asking our host families in Lanzhou how long the journey to Xi'an would take: estimates varied from 7 hours to 15. IT TOOK 12. And whilst the landscapes we drove through were impressive, that's not much consolation when you've been squashed into the same position for 8 hours, with noone to talk to and only a metre from the heavily-frequented bus toilet. When we finally arrived in Xi'an, the 9 of us who'd been on the bus staggered straight to the nearest fast food restaurant and set up a refugee camp on the street outside, where we sat and ate chicken nuggets and fries until we'd recovered a little. After that, it was time to find our hostels: Nicole and I were staying at The Bell Tower Hostel, sharing a room with 5 other PT volunteers. The Bell Tower was obviously the hostel where all past PT volunteers had stayed, because the walls were covered in their names and messages; we added our own names and messages to about four different wall and then headed to Shuyuan "International Party" Hostel, where everyone else was staying. We got lost at literally every opportunity, so didn't arrive until about 12pm, but not only was the hostel bar was still absolutely heaving, but they were still playing live music as well. We liked it so much that we ended up there every night, without fail.

Next morning, my roommates and I treated ourselves to a 9am lie-in - not much by Jiujiang standards, but a luxury after the 6am starts in Lanzhou. Mary, Jonyjony, Jamie and I then went for a decadent Western breakfast of donuts, pastries and smoothies nearby, buying a box of the most exciting-looking donuts for Tessa as well, as it was her birthday. Our assigned job for the day was to organise train tickets back to our projects, so after wandering about for a bit and having lunch, we found tuc-tucs to the station, met up with some of the other volunteers and bought our tickets home. Most of us then had fairly standard drives back to our respective hostels. I say most of us... Mary, Tessa, Jony and Hannah's driver was a crazy drunk, who stopped his tuc-tuc abruptly for no reason, insisting (via mime) that they'd broken it and that they pay him 50RMB each. It usually costs 10RMB per person, per tuc-tuc ride, so the four of them protested until things escalated and they were all shouting, they'd noticed the beer bottle by the driver's seat, the driver was tugging at Mary's arm and, having paid the 10RMB each that it should have cost, they decided just to run away. This didn't go down well, and the tuc-tuc driver chased them down the road and into a taxi, managing to spit through the taxi's open window into Jonny's face before it pulled away. What a charmer.

That afternoon, the survivors of the crazy tuc-tuc, minus Hannah and plus Jono, Patrick, Jamie and I, went to explore the Muslim Quarter of the city. We piled into the back of a white van we found outside Shuyuan Hostel (I realise this sounds like volunteering ourselves for a kidnapping, but let's not dwell on that) and were ferried to the entrance of the Muslim Quarter's market. I won't try to describe the market, because "a picture's worth a thousand words" and I took LOTS of pictures, but basically it was amazing. I started off only planning to buy a bracelet - so far I've bought one in each city I've visited - but ended up with fistfuls of jewellery, plus lots of other bits and pieces I didn't particularly want, but got excited about whilst haggling. The last of these was a fake Chanel scarf that I got - with help from Mary, who is an absolute beast at haggling - from 260 to 30RMB. Amongst the group, we bought rucksacks, hoodies, t-shirts, watches, Mao's Little Red Book (later found to have half its pages glued in upside down), nearly a winter coat from a shop full of furs... and of course heaps of bracelets and earrings (the earrings were mostly me). At some point, we'd left the outdoor market and found our way into the catacomb of the indoor stalls; after several hours bleeding money, we finally emerged back onto the street via the biggest and brightest shop yet, which was a forest of colourful tasselled lanterns pumping out lively Chinese music. It was obviously a bit of a tourist hot-spot, but it was brilliany anyway. It was dark when we finally left, but with everywhere around us lit up, so we had a nice walk back together to the Shuyuan Hostel, where we had dinner and met up with the whole group to go out. As it was Tessa's birthday, we were going to go to a club recommended by Lonely Planet, called 1+1 (although some of the girls took a brief ice-cream detour). The club was very, very cool: loads of pink and purple neon lights, armed security guards, metal detectors to get in, chandeliers, private tables and plush leather booths... unfortunately, it was also 1200RMB just to sit down. We all walked straight back out again, and back down to the bars near the Shuyuan Hostel. These were also very expensive - English prices! so whilst some people stayed for a few drinks, Tessa and I marched off to the corner shop to buy our own alcohol, then headed back to the hostel to wait for everyone else. I was so tired that I was whingeing to go home by about 2, and as I distinctly remember telling someone that I was so tired my eyes felt like potatoes, I think it was probably for the best I left around that time. On the way back I even talked Nicole into sprinting with me, so we'd get back to our beds sooner, which led to a nice embarrassing run past all the fancy clubs (and the rich Chinese teenagers vomiting outside them).

Originally, we'd planned to use our second day in Xi'an to see the Terracotta Army, but a phone call from other volunteers who'd headed off earlier warned us that it was impossibly busy and we'd need to wait for 3 hours just to get on the right bus. Instead, we had another leisurely breakfast, this time poring over our guidebooks, and a group of us eventually decided to go to the Great Goose Pagoda, apparently Xi'an's most famous landmark. For Mary, Tessa and I this was a 15 minute drive on the most ridiculously crowded bus I've ever been on; for Nicole, Jony and Jamie, who physically couldn't fit on the bus, it was another tuc-tuc ride. We spent the morning wandering around the Pagoda: there was a very dramatic fountain show as you first entered, with a loud, triumphal soundtrack and lots of Chinese tourists pulling power stances in front of the fountains for photos; then lots of gardens with weaving, tree-lined paths and rockeries; lots of randomly placed sculptures and statues and, of course, a huge alleyway of market stalls for the benefit of the tourists, where we managed to make a spectacle of ourselves by agreeing to pose for photographs with a few people... which quickly snowballed to *a lot* of people. After that, we went in search of lunch: a really good Cantonese restaurant (aka British-style Chinese, which meant sweet and sour chicken!) a little outside the city walls. Unfortunately, we couldn't find a taxi after we'd finished lunch, so had no choice but to plod off up the street, in the rain, hoping to flag one down later. Every single taxi drove straight past us, and we had no idea how far we were from the city walls, so eventually we were driven to ask for directions in our broken Chinese: first from a girl in the door of a KTV bar, then from the receptionists in a pretty fancy hotel. After another long walk in the rain, lots of waiting in the rain, a bus ride and another walk in the rain, we finally made it back to familiar territory. And it only took us about 2 hours!

Not having had enough of the rain already, Jamie and I decided that we wanted to go back to the Muslim Quarter to see the Great Mosque and set off through the rain again. We asked for directions from locals who, it turned out, had absolutely no idea and sent us off in completely the wrong direction; by the time we finally reached the mosque, it had closed. The doors to the mosque compound were huge metal ones, but the gap beneath them was enormous and there was enough room for someone to crawl under them quite easily... inside the compound, the layout was of an enclosed square courtyard, with large square temple-type buildings both in the middle and at the far end, and doors about the square leading off to rooms of worship. All of these doors were shut and barred so we couldn't do much more than read the information signs set outside them, but we had a nosey around the outside of the two temple-type buildings (stepping over red tape and scrambling over a small wall where necessary) before giving it up and retreating to the street. My camera died on the way to the Great Mosque, so I have no photos, but we didn't manage to see much that was photo-worthy so that's no great loss! We wandered back via some very narrow, muddy, dodgy-looking alleyways - as directed by an equally dodgy-looking shopkeeper - and another tuc-tuc, which we haggled for like pros, before having dinner at our hostel and heading back to the Shuyuan.

Our group had claimed the pool room directly beside the bar so we spent most of the evening there, chatting, drinking and talking to other travellers. By about one we'd moved into the main bar area, where we joined a big group of travellers who talked us into going to a club just outside the city walls with them. The club was called Salsa and, although my judgement is probably slightly skewed by experience of Renaissance, it was pretty cool. There was a dance floor with small dancing platforms, playing typical Western club music, a huge bar with a stage in the middle for customers to dance on whilst they waited for their drinks, and tables and booths dotted throughout the rest of the club where groups of people sat drinking and snacking. I say snacking because THE CLUB DID SNACKS! The table our group was led to ordered several glass plates of fruit (unfortunately I realised these came with tomatoes, not grapes. Ew) and a tub of toffee popcorn, plus pitchers of drinks and a vase full of tall fluted glasses of something I couldn't identify. The group we'd came with were so unbelievably nice to us, and generous, that I began to suspect we were being groomed, but no, they were just really, really nice. None of us were really prepared for a night out in a fancy club (we were all exhausted, not to mention wearing jeans and hoodies - not that this stopped everyone on the dance-floor from manhandling us into hundreds of photos), but before we knew it it was 6am and we had to pile back into taxis before our early starts a few hours later.

Next morning, Mary, Nicole and I from our hostel were meant to meet the girls from Shuyuan Hostel to get a minibus to the Terracotta Army, as arranged by Beth and Catherine. We were already running late because checking out took longer than expected, but then we found that the fleet of tuc-tucs which usually waits outside the hostel had disappeared and flew into a mad panic. Luckily the mini-bus driver agreed to come and collect us from our hostel, but we still managed to fit in lots of panicked running down the street and across busy roads. Nicole also had to lend me quite a lot of money, because my bank account was playing up again and insisting my balance was minus 15000RMB (vicious lies, I checked as soon as I got home and it was absolutely fine so I've no idea what was going on there). We stopped off on our way to the site of the excavation to visit the factory where all the tourist souvenirs are made: even the small things were quite expensive, although you can haggle, but we got lots of photos of ourselves imitating Terracotta Warriors by standing behind headless statues, so it was a worthwhile stop. The queues at the actual site of the Terracotta Army were immense, but we managed to avoid the worst of them by joining the line for student-tickets which worked miraculously well. We'd all bought our tickets within about 10 minutes, and managed to get them half-price just by flashing various ID cards. The woman selling our tickets didn't really care to be honest - I could probably have got away with waving my Boots card! From the ticket booths, it's a long meander through very congested parkland to the pits where you can see the Army, but Catherine managed to steer us ahead of most other tourists by pretending to be a tour guide. When we arrived, there was a brief delay as people went to the toilets and those of us waiting posed with snap-happy tourists, and then we headed straight to Pit 1 - the biggest and the best!

At first, all I could see of Pit 1 was the sandy ground of the pits; the viewing balconies were so densely packed with tourists that I couldn't get close enough to see anything more. It took some determination and innovative elbow-work before I was able to fight my way to a spot from which I could look down into the pit. Even then, the scale of the army took a while to register. At first, I only saw the columns and columns of soldiers, and it was a few seconds before I noticed how detailed each of their faces were... and that there were columns and columns more behind them! About 1000 figures have been excavated so far, but experts estimate that there are about 8000 in total. Our barging skills quickly improving, we managed to work our way around the perimeter of the pit, taking lots of photos and gasping over the scale of it. Some figures had obviously been shattered into dozens of pieces before they were dug up, but they'd been rebuilt so cleverly that you could barely see the cracks between what had been separate fragments. Post-Pit 1, we were all massively unimpressed with Pit 2; they haven't finished excavating it yet, and all you can see are the walls of the trenches, no actual figures. Pit 3 is by far the smallest, but we all quite liked it; because it's so small, you feel a lot closer to the excavation and the several upended soldiers give the impression that it's recently discovered - rather than one of China's biggest tourist attractions. It also, however, had its fair share of litter: discarded drinks bottles and packages thrown by careless tourists into the empty trench at the front of the pit. I think only in China would people travel hundreds of miles to visit one of the most famous archaeological sites in the world... and then chuck their rubbish at it when they're done!
On our return from the Terracotta Army, Nicole and I had dinner at the Shuyuan Hostel (I realise you probably don't need to hear about this, but it would be sacrilege if I didn't mention the amazing chilli con carne I had. It was so good, I've dreamt about it since.), said our goodbyes to every other volunteer we could find and went to catch our train back to Jiujiang.

So, that's the end of our first set of travels through China. We're now getting used to being back home and teaching again... and planning our next trip!

Ella xxx