Exhausted after a day of exploring the Terracotta Warrior Museum followed by street badminton made hilarious by a strong easterly wind, we sprawled lazily on our futon and perused a takeout menu. Julian started laboriously translating the menu line by line, and not too far down was the following choice:

"Old dry mother stir fried intestinal squares"

Too bad the restaurant turned out to be closed because that definitely would've been on order.

Oh, what's that, you want me to dedicate more than a brief reference to the Terracotta warriors rather than breeze by it on the way to an anecdote about food?

Well, the warriors are imposing in parts, piled willy nilly and cracked in others, and surrounded by the strangest touristy village filled with things like KFC and foofy pomegranate breweries right next door to one another, all housed in buildings crafted superficially to look village-like.

Probably the strangest part of the whole place, though, is in a corner of the gift shop where they're selling books telling the story of the farmer who inadvertently first stumbled upon the warriors while sowing his crops or whatever. They literally have the actual farmer, an old bemused looking guy, signing copies of his book and posing for pictures with cheesing families at the edge of the table.

I mean, has he had, and does he have, to do this every day the museum is and has been open since the 1970s? Doesn't that get incredibly tiresome? Does he have some kind of government contract? Does he have a choice? I guess his farm suddenly became a sprawling tourist attraction crawling with archaeologists, so it's not like he could just keep farming. But it just seems strange.