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My friend Amandine and me spent last Christmas in China. We saw amazing places and tried food that went from dubious to delicious, but the most surprising feat is how we managed to travel about the most populous country in the world without speaking a word of Mandarin Chinese while finding that English is not a common occurrence amongst the Chinese people. Not surprising at all is the fact that I want to go back and even live there for a while. Why? Allow me the cliché, but I must say: because of the people! Oh, really? Really. Let me tell you about the day we wanted to visit the Xi’an Terracotta Army. We arrived to Xi’an very early in the morning, having taken a night train from Pingyao – somewhere between Beijing and Xi’an, which holds an ancient city with well preserved architecture from the Ming and Qing dynasties –. With time to spare, we went for a traditional breakfast and sat in a café, where we could properly wake up and relax until it was a decent time to start exploring the touristy bits of the city. Just before 9am, we went to the Info tourism office, outside the station, to ask for directions to visit the famous Terracotta army. A lovely lady with very little English pointed us in a direction and told us to walk 10 minutes. After walking that time in that direction, we arrived to a little office beside the Xi’an city walls which happened to be, as we suspected, one of the entries to the walls. Lightly amused by the wrong directions previously given to us, we asked for new ones. This new lady, with slightly better English than the previous one, pointed us back to the main station and told us to get a train. The amusement started to give way to some sort of annoyance, but we returned, passed through the usual security check that welcomed us at the entrance of every station we had been in so far, and seeing no one to ask, we decided to try our luck with the self-service machines. Unfortunately they were in Chinese only – of course. Eventually a security guard, who saw us completely lost, yet again, had no clue of English, took us to a random young girl who was busy in one of the self-service machines and prompted us to speak to her. Slightly surprised at first, she took out her phone and with the help of a translating app, we managed to communicate. She told us we needed to get, not a train, but a bus, for which we needed to exit again to the main square, out of the railway station, and look for said bus. So we did. However, looking for said number bus was another ordeal. The amount of bus stops in the three main avenues starting in that square was ridiculously high and yet the bus number we were looking for was nowhere to be found! After a while, we were sent to the top right side of the square by another kind man, who told us that we needed to follow the city walls for a bit and cross a road to find our bus. Then we saw them: a line of green buses with massive signs in both Chinese and English that read “Xi’an Terracotta Warriors and Horses”. We were overwhelmed by emotion: happiness of having found the elusive bus, rush by the woman that shoved us on it, to depart as soon as possible, stress by the unpleasant experience that finding our way had been. It was noon when we got to the Terracotta Army museum. After three hours of uncertainty, we allowed ourselves to sit down on a bench, take a deep breath and enjoy the sun that was high in the sky, letting go of all the stress of the morning. We had arrived: we could have focused on the negative side of the adventure, maybe even given up, but with perseverance and, most importantly, thanks to the people that had helped us as best as they could, we were about to see one of the most famous excavation sites in the world.