Word of the day: inspontanent

(from spontaneous, adj, 1: uncontrollably leaking bursts of spontaneity, 2: definition 2 is up for grabs, possibly related to spontaneous disintegration of previously held plans )

What was supposed to be a group expedition to go see the Terra Cotta Warriors self-destructed at the last minute; of the five other (by which I mean not living in my house) people who were on the final list of attendees: one mistook his plans and was replaced by the sister of another, and the two of them went for sister bonding time rather than hanging out with a bunch of strangers; one turned out not to have been able to get a ticket after all, which I learned by calling to find out where she was mid-way through our entry time window; and one I saw briefly in the exhibit and completely failed to say hi to before she disappeared into the next room. So it was just grauwulf, tamnonlinear, and me, which was perfectly acceptable but not at all what I was expecting. I'm trying to decide if this is the world telling me I should give up on attempting to arrange these things, or that I need to practice doing it more often. Certainly in future I need to make sure I have phone numbers for everyone involved in more useful places than "possibly somewhere in grauwulf's e-mail" before leaving the house.

At any rate, social fail aside it was a lovely exhibit, if a bit light on actual content and excavation detail. Possibly the audio tour, which none of us rented, might have been more informative. They had a decent number of the warriors, a bunch of other artifacts of varying interest, and some overview cultural signage, which was all nice, but there was very little in the way of excavation photos, and only one nice map of exactly what was found where. I had not been previously aware that the rather extravagant tomb complex of the duke of Ch'in apparently was never lost, but the pits with the clay warriors in them were nearly a mile off from the main complex, and after being looted for weapons some time not long after the Emperor's burial enough of the support posts were burned that the pits collapsed and were forgotten about until the fateful well digging incident forty years ago. There wasn't any explanation that I saw about the scattered and distant arrangement of the outlying pits (several full of warriors, but also a few with water birds, and musicians & acrobats, also in clay and bronze) the little they did say leads me to wonder if this wasn't intended to be the outer ring of what was planned to be a much larger collection of figures that was cut short by the death of the Emperor.

I was also quite amused to learn that there are currently no plans to excavate the tomb complex because remote sensing indicates that the contemporary account of the tomb including a model of the empire's river systems with mercury instead of water is probably true.