No alarm clock this morning, which made things easier. It was bright and the sky was even a blue shade of white today, which is nice. Unfortunately, in keeping with Chinese plumbing problems, our loo blocked, and we had to ask someone to fix it. These things annoy Mikey much more than they annoy me: he likes things to work and I don't mind quite so much.

We walked to the train station to find a bus, and stopped at all the big banks to try and withdraw money, with no success. The Bank of China is supposed to allow foreign cardholders to use their machines, but we haven't managed it yet. The bus we needed, the 306, took us right to the car park of the museum of the Army of Terracotta Warriors. It was a long walk to the entrance itself, along broad, paved paths through parkland. There was a market in full swing here, too, selling a variety of souveneirs. I was particularly taken with the dog skins hanging on a wall behind one stall - great German shepherd or Lassie-style collie pelts, complete with muzzle and eye holes. Not sure how well dog-skin would go down at home, though!

The museum compound was a huge expanse of paving and cream brick buildings with flower beds and trees liberally scattered around. It was actually a nice site, very modern and clean-looking despite the thousands of locals spitting all over the place. There are three main warrior pits and a museum. We started at Pit 1, the largest, and worked our way through. I think, in retrospect, it would have been better to start in a different order, which would have made the site more impressive, and the work that went into the excavations and the amount that is still to be done only really became clear by the end.

As a brief introduction, some peasants discovered some pottery in 1974 and it turned out that an Emperor, two thousand years ago, had commissioned an entire army, of about six thousand figures, to be made out of terracotta and placed in his mausoleum to keep him company in the afterlife. The figures are all life-sized and include horses and chariots and a variety of weapons. What is probably most astonishing is that every figure has a different face, and apparently no two are alike.

Pit 1 was a huge aircraft-hangar-like building that was much lighter than I expected. It covered row upon row of soldiers in various uniforms, standing in pits. It wasn't made clear, but we later discovered that the walls inbetween the columns of soldiers were corridors that supported a roof. The whole vault would have been covered over, and no record of the place existed. It is incredible to think that these clay men were created two thousand years ago and have been so well preserved and excavated that they look as pristine as they do. Only about one thousand figures are on display at the moment: there is still a huge amount of work to do to recover the others. The whole thing doesn't look as impressive as it should, though, and at first glance it's just a bunch of statues. I think it is the nature of so many tourist attractions that they just herd people in to take photographs and then try to sell them souvenirs. I think, although the building and the site itself is very pretty, more could be done, especially in English, to describe just how remarkable this find was.

Pit 2 was a dark room with some excavations in progress. There were a lot of limbs sticking out of the ground, and a horse's bottom poking through a wall. This hall showed much more of the scale of the work, and there were several figures in glass cases on display. If this had been the first point of the tour, it would have made the subsequent sites more remarkable. It was too dark to take photos, and anyway, we weren't supposed to, but people were. There was a diagram on the wall to show how the soldiers were lined up which made a bit more sense of it all.

The third pit was a strange-shaped, steep-sided hole in the ground holding a number of headless men and a couple of horses. The figures in this area had been badly damaged. This place was much smaller than the others, and nice and bright, and the bricks used to pave the floor, and some of the other details, like the different styles of dress, were more evident here. This should have been the second place to visit, and it would have made the largest pit the most spectacular.

We had a quick look at the museum, a huge building with three small exhibitions in it. They displayed a number of gold and silver articles found during the digs, and a couple of miniature carriages with horses discovered in another tomb down the road. The third display was really a promotional tool to tell us all how hard the museum staff worked ("they have hardly worked over the last twenty years") and how grateful they are to the government. The whole thing didn't take as long as we had expected it to, and it was only after we'd searched out more information, that we really saw how impressive it all was.

We found the bus back and then decided to look for some food as we'd eaten nothing but bread rolls and fruit all day. It took us ages to find a restaurant, though, as most places were KFC or McDonald's and we wanted real food. The place we finally visited had a large fast-food area downstairs with such delicacies as "nutritious beef penis in soup", and various organs and limbs but there was a proper restaurant upstairs. We were ushered right into a corner in the furthest room of the place, and recieved the customary stares that the sole westerners are due. The menu was entirely in Chinese and given the type of things on the menu downstairs, we didn't want to guess. We asked if they had anything in English, and the waitress said no. We thought we ought to leave and find somewhere else, giving in, I know, but we were hungry, and then miraculously, we were handed a list of about two hundred items in Chinese, pinyin and English. A few things we pointed at weren't available, and one of the items we ordered didn't materialise, but we had plenty to eat and managed to order some pickled vegetables from a trolley somehow. Without managing to find a bank today, our funds were seriously depleted now. We have to get some money tomorrow!

As we walked back to the hotel, a young boy offered us flowers. We did the customary 'no thank you' and continued walking, but he didn't give in. In fact, he ran along side us and even put a rose into my pocket saying that there was no charge for me. There was, however, a charge for Mikey, as the boy patiently explained. I tried to give the flower back, but he dodged out of my way, and even when I tried to chase him down the road he avoided me. In the end Mikey gave him the 30p he was asking for and he left us alone. I was impressed with the sales technique, and the rose even smelled wonderful, which is something you don't often get in England.

The loo had been fixed by the time we got back, which was a good thing. We were back in the room in plenty of time to phone Mikey's grandmother for her birthday. We'd bought an extra phonecard in Beijing, there was no need to enable to phone for international calls with it, and we were ready and well-prepared. Unfortunately, it wasn't as straightforward as that. The phonecard is only valid for Beijing, something we weren't expecting. We didn't have enough cash for another card. The hotel wanted 200 yuan to enable the phone to make a call to England, which we certainly didn't have. We also didn't have long to call before everyone went out to lunch.

Mikey managed to persuade the hotel to take our remaining money as a deposit for an international call, and after waiting for half an hour, phoned reception again and got them to enable our phone. Twenty minutes of polite recorded messages later we worked out that the number in the hotel directory wasn't the number for an international call and made something up, which worked. We sang happy birthday to Nana, and she seemed really pleased to hear from us, which was nice. I think she's the only member of the family we haven't been able to email, and we haven't had a chance to phone her yet, either. So, while the evening didn't go as planned we did get there in the end. All we can hope for now is for the people in the room next to ours to turn their television down a bit...