Our taxi was stopped at a red light on the way from the Panda Reserve to the hotel. I looked to my right and caught this old guy peering over at Jamie with what my farmer father always called “a shit eating grin”.

“Give him a little wave,” I said. She did. And he broke into a huge smile and gave her a thumbs up.

Do you know anyone who’s studying Chinese? We don’t. But everyone here in China is learning English. I mean everyone.

As we were walking through the Panda park this morning we passed this group of kids and their teachers on a field trip. The little boys all shouted, “Hello!”

I turned to them and responded, stuck my hand out and said, “Shake hands.” The first little boy pulled away, but another kid in the second row pushed through and stuck his hand out. That was all the rest of them needed. They all crowded around and wanted to shake hands.

The teacher thanked us and said the whole class has learned how to say, “Hello,” “Good morning,” and “How are you?” in English.

Damn, those kids were cute.

As far as Jamie’s concerned our ’round the world trip is now a success and it’s all down hill from here. Screw the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, the Terra Cotta Soldiers, Beijing and Shanghai. Screw ’em all. If we had to come home tomorrow, she’d be ok with it.

This attitude can be explained by the fact that we visited the Chengdu Panda Reserve where she got to cuddle a panda for five minutes while the staff took photos and a video. It’s what the woman has been waiting for since our friend Ginny Parkinson told her that she had done it several years ago.

I can’t tell you how happy and excited she was when she came out of the enclosure.

I also can’t tell you how happy and excited I was, but for a different reason. Just before she went in they told us about the woman who had been mauled by a panda when she innocently touched him in a way he didn’t appreciate. Jamie was in with the panda for so long that I was afraid they had rushed her to the emergency room. Whew! What a relief when she walked out the door with a big smile on her face.

As much as we hated Xi’ An, we love Chengdu. Maybe more. It has wide, tree-lined streets, blue skies, beautiful architecture, a lovely river, and reasonable traffic (at least by Chinese standards). We felt completely safe roaming the streets at 10 o’clock last night.

Chengdu just plain looks prosperous and the people are happy and smiling.

Of course, that’s a lot easier to do when you’re prosperous.

NOTE: The lighted bridge over the river is just across the street from our hotel, which is the skyscraper just to the right of the bridge.

Despite the fact that we have a very good friend who’s Buddhist, I know next to nothing about the religion. So forgive me if I mangle a few facts here, Richie.

Jamie and I frittered away some time in an airport coffee shop while waiting for our flight from Xi’ An to Chengdu. The two guys at the next table were Buddhist monks.

When we finally moseyed out to our gate there were two open seats next to the the monks. I said, “Let’s go sit next to them, Jamie. This should be interesting.” She, of course, thought I was insane. Especially when I insisted that she take the seat next to them.

We hadn’t been seated for more than a minute when the older one reached across the younger one and tapped her on the leg. Note that he tapped her on the leg, not the arm and not the shoulder.

They spoke not a word of English and we spoke not a word of Chinese, but that didn’t stop us from trying to communicate.

The way we understand the story, the older one is a very prominent monk. He’s written books and he does a lot of public speaking. We know this because he pulled out his iPhone and began scrolling through photos of himself speaking and pointing to himself and miming writing when he got to the photo of his book.

Far as we could tell they had just been at some sort of Buddhist convocation and were on their way home to their monastery here in Chengdu. It might have been that the younger monk was some sort of pledge who got hazed at the convocation. (Wait. Am I confusing entering the priesthood with joining a fraternity?)

They were quite smitten with Jamie. The younger one wanted her email address. They were very happy to have their photo taken with her.

But then, who wouldn’t be?

The terra cotta army may be the only good reason to come to Xi’ An.

The first Chinese emperor, the guy who unified the feuding feudal war lords into one country, made a lot of enemies along the way and decided he needed protection in the afterlife. So he created thousands of terra cotta soldiers to stand guard over his tomb.

The emperor wanted to keep his army a secret, so as soon as the craftsmen completed the soldiers, the emperor had them buried. They were buried for 2200 years until a farmer stumbled upon one in 1974 while digging a well. He took it to the government and said, “What the hell is this?” (That may not be an exact translation, but it’s close enough for government work.)

The Chinese government sent crews out to investigate and they unearthed thousands of the terra cotta soldiers. Unfortunately, it turns out that after 2200 years underground the oxygen in the atmosphere quickly begins destroying the bright colors the soldiers had originally been painted.

So in an interesting twist of fate, as soon as researchers dig up another terra cotta soldier, they do a little photography and then quickly re-bury it to preserve the colors.

The emperor was unavailable for comment.

On the way from the airport to Xi’ An we saw an apartment building under construction. And when I say an apartment building I mean a 30 or 40 story behemoth. As we got closer we realized that there were dozens of identical buildings in the same immense complex.

A mile down the road we saw another identical complex under construction. Same thing another mile down the road. And again and again and again. And to each side of us the horizon was dotted with similar complexes on each side of the highway. I tried to count the number of buildings in one complex as we drove past, but lost track at 33.

In case you think I’m exaggerating for story value, I asked Jamie how many immense apartment buildings we saw between the airport and our hotel. She said, “At least five hundred.”

To repeat, five hundred apartment buildings, each of them thirty to forty stories high, just in a regional city like Xi’ An.

Did you know that the Chinese are currently re-digging the Panama Canal to make it twice as wide? Imposing as that sounds, I’m sure it pales in comparison to the amount of building they’re doing here at home.

Remember the movie Blade Runner, one of Harrison Ford’s first big hits? It was a 1984 science fiction thriller that took place in Los Angeles in the year 2019. It presented a dark, disturbing, dystopian picture of the future.

Well, you don’t have to wait until 2019 to see if Blade Runner comes true. We’ve seen that dark, disturbing, dystopian future and it’s right here in Xi’ An, China.

We had never heard of Xi’ An until we began planning this trip. We both wanted to see the terra cotta soldiers and it turns out they’re located in Xi’ An, which is a two hour plane trip from Beijing.

Since we’d never heard of Xi’ An, we assumed it was some quaint little country town that just happened to be home to these remarkable relics. Boy, we’re we wrong. It turns out that the population of Xi’ An is somewhere between 8 million and 13 million, depending on who you ask.

The streets are as tangled as a can of spaghetti. The traffic is chaotic. The neon is garish. The heat and humidity are oppressive. The smog’s so thick you can’t see down to the end of the block. And the poverty is overwhelming.

I’ve stayed at a lot of very nice hotels during my career and the Xi’An Hilton is equal to any of them. But our taxi driver took us through the bowels of the city to reach the hotel and Jamie and I were in the back seat wondering into what hell we had descended.

He finally turned a corner and this oasis jumped out at us. We walked into the hotel dumbfounded that this gorgeous hotel was sitting in the middle of this squalor. After checking in we walked out to the markets across the street. It was eight o’clock at night and the heat and humidity were still overwhelming.

I think we made it a block before Jamie said, “Let’s go back to the hotel.” I didn’t argue.

The photo accompanying this story looks far better than the reality. This is a restaurant and the menu sits out in front. I have no idea how long those cooked crayfish had been sitting out in the heat and I have no idea what the live, wiggling things were nor how long they could continue wiggling in the heat. And neither of us really wanted to find out.

Xi’ An. The only thing missing is Harrison Ford.

I always assumed the stories about Beijing’s horrible smog were gross exaggerations. But, no, they are absolutely accurate. It’s almost like you’re looking at the city through a layer of gauze. It also explains why all our photos look blown out. There is no blue sky here to be photographed.

Right after lunch yesterday Jamie pointed up at the sun and told me to take a look. Instead of being bright enough to burn your retinas, it looked like the moon through a light fog.

One thing that was exaggerated is the popularity of those silly surgical masks. Based on news reports I expected everyone to be wearing them, but they are few and far between. And oddly enough, most of the people who wear them only cover their mouths, not their noses.

Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of wearing them?

Today we roamed through one of those crazy, noisy Chinese alleyway bazaars that you see in the movies.

I almost got up the nerve to try fried beetles, but just about gagged at the thought of eating the starfish on a stick. And yet, somehow, that sound delish compared to the living, wiggling scorpions on a stick.

What is wrong with these people?