A new friend in a new city

Today I arrived in Urumqui, the first stop on my tour around China, mostly including the silk road, which will start here, then I’ll got to Kashgar for the weekend, then to Dunhuang, and then to Xian. The city feels so much smaller than Beijing, and as I was driving around in a taxi, I kept thinking that things just felt different, and I couldn’t put my finger on it until I looked up ahead and realized that I could see rows and rows of buildings because the smog wasn’t blocking them. There’s blue sky! It’s amazing! I had forgotten what life was like without so much pollution. While Urumqui is smaller than Beijing, it is the capital of the province and has 2.3 million residents, so the same population more or less as the greater Denver area. The city seems older and more run down than Beijing is, but maybe that’s just because I can actually see the buildings here to note their state.

I had an afternoon available after checking in to my hotel, so I went to the Xinjian Autonomous Region Museum. The museum is free and houses the mummies found in parts of the desert in this region, as well as taking you on a tour of the different ethnicities found here, with examples of their homes, clothing, lifestyle, etc. It was a pretty cool museum, and my guidebook had suggested asking for the free English speaking guide available, but there didn’t seem to be anyone to ask as the museum was free and there was no ticket booth, so I just wandered, and there were a lot of dramatic, but good signs in English.

As I made my way to the second floor, I heard a voice say “Hello, do you need a guide?” I turned around, and there was Katherine. She volunteers at the museum because her aunt works there, and she is one of the aforementioned English speaking guides. She took me on a tour of the mummies rather quickly because that isn’t her specialty, and then we went back down to the regional ethnicity part, which is her specialty, so she could show me through again. It really was a funny tour, and she’s very good at walking backwards. And whenever she’d get stuck on her English, she’d just point to the sign, and say “You can read that,” which mostly made me laugh because I’d already read the signs in the ethnic regions exhibit, so I’d start prompting her when she got stuck.

Katherine is 16, and is out of school for the summer. Her English is really excellent, and she was good company, if a less than perfectly polished tour guide. She shared some interesting things about the museum with me, and when she discovered that this was my first time in Urumqi, she wanted to know if I’d had any Xinjiang food yet. I hadn’t, and she felt the need to rectify that, so we left the museum on a hunt for regional food. I asked her several times if her parents or aunt needed to know where she was, or if they were OK with her doing this, and she kept insisting that it was fine, and she provided some great food suggestions as we stopped at a few stands. She tried to make the traditional bread guy make me a hot traditional bread, but he didn’t want to. It took about 5 minutes before he convinced her to take the regular one, because she really, really wanted me to like it, and said it was better hot.

Then we made our way down the street, past a bakery, where she wouldn’t let me stop even though it looked delicious because it was not traditional, and into a hole in the wall restaurant, that turned out to be beautiful inside. “Do you want a snack or a meal?” She asked. When I replied that I was ready for dinner she ordered for me. We started with Uyghur yoghurt (tart and delicious, with a sprinkling of sugar on top), then a plate of mutton cooked with rice and carrots (my favorite thing I’ve eaten so far in China- and the Uyghur use silverware, not chopsticks), and a cucumber salad. I felt like this was plenty of food, and Katherine only had a bite or two since she’d had a late lunch. But then my roast mutton kebab with a spicy rub came out with a gigantic plate of chopped noodles in a mildly spicy sauce. You can eat the skewered meat plain, or twist it off into the noodles (a much better choice as it toned down the spiciness). It was amazing, and I probably would have not known to order it if she hadn’t been there with me.

Katherine was a fount of information not so much about the history of the region, but about daily life in China. Her English is so good, but she’s worried that she won’t get a high enough score on the Gao Kao, the college entrance exam, so she’s thinking about going to college in the US. Turpan, where she’s from has a sister city in Hunan province, and since there are not very many good schools in the poorer Turpan, the city in Hunan hosts students from Turpan to go to the better schools there. Her mom appears to be a construction worker- Katherine says she’s always sunburned from working so many hours outside, and her Dad seems to rotate between similar types of jobs. From Katherine’s perspective, this means that they are working very hard to support her in her education, and she’s very grateful to them.

So it ended up being a wonderfully unexpected afternoon, and I had a great time on my first day in a new city, talking with a new friend.