Shopping our way through China

I try to be completely honest with you all, even if it paints me in a not-so-favorable light, and so I say in my defense that I DID think the Terra Cotta soldiers were interesting today, but it’s a site, similar to the Louvre Museum, that I can be in and out of in an hour or so.  I liken these attention limitations not to dimwittedness or lack of culture and sophistication but argue they are more attributable to the fact that I am, clearly, a social and cultural anthropologist and not a historical one, and I therefore have no shame that some people think me an artistic/ historical dullard.

So let it suffice to state that those Terra Cotta soldiers sure are old and they sure are cool and here is a picture of Ron whipping out his credit card and buying a replica of one for his avant garde and varied collection of art at his house.

I myself have done a little shopping as well, having picked up a pair of geisha-themed (wrong country, I am aware) tweezers that I like very much, along with an “I climbed the Great Wall” t-shirt that I find ironic in the same way as that Jameson whiskey logo t-shirt I work out in all the time.

All right, and just for the sake of completeness and accuracy, here’s a shot of the main room of TC soldiers, from 2000 years ago:

This tour only came to Xi’an to view the TC soldiers, but I have discovered much of interest here.  One thing is that this city appears to be much newer than Beijing but has a population of 12 million and growing rapidly by the looks of the housing development I see from the bus.  They are building EVERYWHERE!  And there’s not a single family house in sight.  It’s miles and miles of high rises.  But it’s so different than Tacoma.  In Tacoma, someone plans a new building and it’s a single building, maybe 10 stories, and the News Tribune writes an article about it, and they have trouble renting the units but eventually it gets filled up.  But here, I think there’s a lot of pressure to build (but no homeless people that I can see, not even driving through town at our 3am arrival last night) and so they build 10 and 20 high rises at a time in mostly similar architecture and as they build them I believe the population is simultaneously outgrowing them.  It’s really quite unatrractive, I have to say:

The other thing I find interesting about Xi’an is the population’s extremely liberal interpretation of a 3 lane traffic circle, which we got caught in on our way back to the hotel just a little bit ago.  We were literally falling apart with excitement and a little bit of fear on the bus, watching this thing play out.  My pictures are not great, but I’m posting them anyway, just so you can get a sense of it all.  There’s easily 7 cars across at places, all honking and cutting each other off and trying to merge right or left for no apparent reason.  Also present are hundreds of mopeds and bikes, darting in and out of it all.  We’re off to Shanghai in the morning so you won’t hear from me for a bit.