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.

Boulder's Boulders

During this last impromptu Weekend ‘o’ Fitness (Flagstaff Mountain and a 23 mile bike ride in the same weekend! Sorry, feet! Sorry, legs! I hope you regain feeling soon) Dan and I came upon a strange phenomenon: tourists. We had just started our descent down Flagstaff Mountain, and had come to the first portion where the trail intersects with the road. A car with Colorado plates pulled up to us, and inside were two people, a man and a woman, that looked almost precisely like the stereotype of Boulderites: the man was all slender muscle and khakis, and the woman was casually dressed with messed-up hair, but with perfectly plucked eyebrows and expensive sunglasses. So we were not expecting what came out when they opened their mouths.

“Hi! We were wondering how to get to some good boulders.”

Now, the Front Range of the Rockies is hardly anything BUT boulders. We were, at that moment, standing in front of a bunch of boulders; down the canyon, clearly visible from the car, was the back of the first Flatiron, Saddle Rock, and, maybe two minutes by car away, Crown Rock, a major bouldering destination. Boulders were literally everywhere.

Confused, I asked, “So you want to go bouldering?”

Their faces turned to the edges of panic. “No! No! Not… go…bouldering… what’s bouldering?”

Dan had to explain to them what bouldering was, only he inadvertently made it sound easy. Something like, “well, it’s like climbing, but you don’t need any rope or anything and the rocks are only about ten feet high.”

“Oh, wow, that sounds fun!” exclaimed the man. “Wouldn’t you like to go bouldering, honey?”

At which the woman exclaimed, “No!”

Now everybody was confused; if they didn’t want to go bouldering or even know what it was, then what kind of boulders were they looking for and why were they not seeing the boulders surrounding them at every turn?

I directed them down the road about a mile to Crown Rock, but as we came down the trail, I saw their car shoot right by it, as if Crown Rock weren’t a GIANT, OBVIOUS OUTCROPPING OF ROCKS WITH BOULDERING CHALK ALL OVER THEM, FLANKED BY A PARKING LOT THAT SAYS ‘CROWN ROCK’ ON IT. At the bottom of the road I wouldn’t be surprised if they also flew past Gregory Canyon (walls made of beautiful striated rock) or the Flatirons (huge park with jillions of hiking trails flanked by rocks leading to the most famous giant rocks in town) or, if they turned north, Red Rocks (tall spires of red boulders randomly shooting out of the top of a hill) and the Hogback Ridge (boulders that form spines on a mountain ridge like the hair-raising of threatened pigs).

Perhaps tourists are told that the boulders in Boulder are made from gold, or that they emit a soothing glow, or that they are bluish green in color, or that in some other way they look like no other boulders on earth.