Riding a camel with...

Two humps!

But let's not get ahead of ourselves. I met Abdul (yes, that's really his name) the tour guide, on Saturday afternoon to make arrangements for Sunday. He was concerned that my independent trip to the Sunday livestock market and bazaar would take too long and we wouldn't make it to the desert in a timely manner, so he agreed to drive me. I learned through his expertise that one can buy a "good standard camel" for about 15,000 RMB, the same for a good standard horse or cow. A good standard Donkey was only about 1,000 RMB. It was sort of like the Denver Stock show only less clean, louder, and with yaks.

Next we went to the famed Sunday marketplace where you can buy nearly anything you'd ever want (including, apparently, random dried snakes, lizards and rats to use in traditional medicine), amidst hordes of people. This market is considered the largest in Central Asia, and is where the European and Chinese lines of the Silk road met- people would bring goods from both directions to sell in this marketplace.

Afterwards we went to lunch, which is more problematic than it sounds- the Uyghars are Islamic, and right now they are celebrating Ramadan, which means that they fast from sun up to sun down. Which means that most restaurants in town are now closed between sun up and sun down. We finally found one, but also discovered that the desert site only 2 hours away from Kashgar was now closed to foreigners, so we had to go to a new site 4 hours away, which meant that our time frame had just been reduced. I ate my rice pilaf with a spoon, and we ran out the door to spend 4 Long Hot Hours in Abdul's black car without air conditioning. This was just as miserable as you would expect it to be until we hit something in the middle of the road.

This is a picture of our very flat tire:

This is a picture of Abdul trying to fix the flat tire:

This is a picture of the first repair place we stopped at after Abdul failed to change the tire, and drove 2 km so he could get someone else to fix it:

This is a picture of the second repair place we stopped at after the first repair place couldn't change the flat tire (notice the chickens and very small child randomly poking around):

They were closed, but let Abdul use their tools to change the tire. After a number of other mishaps resulting from not using the parking brake or blocks on the front tires along with parking on a relatively steep incline, Abdul managed to change the tire. Meanwhile, I amused myself by purchasing ice water from roadside stands. Remember that it is Ramadan, and Abdul was changing the tire for nearly an hour in 44 degree Celsius (more than 110 Fahrenheit) while fasting all day and not being allowed to drink water. He was also horribly embarrassed, so I refrained from making helpful suggestions. He's only been driving for 3 years, and I seriously doubt that he's ever changed a tire before, but I don't think that cultural norms would have let him take advantage of skills acquired doing car repair with my Dad and from a brother who worked for Discount tire. Also the fact that his lug wrench seemed to have the socket split open indicated that I would have been unable to help anyway.

Thus ends installment #1 of the Great Camel Adventure Trek! Next up, more pictures of camels. Specifically, Me on a camel. In the desert!

B for Bactrian?

I'm about to head off into the desert for an overnight camping and camel trek. The question is, will my camel be a Bactrian camel (two humps) or a dromedary camel (one hump)? Evidence suggests that Silk Road camels are Bactrian, and I'm very excited by this possibility! I've ridden dromedary camels before, but never a Bactrian!

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.

Yuanmingyuan park and the Forbidden City!

Some of the other excursions we’ve been on include the Old Summer Palace and the Forbidden City. The old summer palace is relatively close to where we live, and we had quite the adventure getting there. Google maps does a remarkably good job with bus routes in Beijing, so we looked up online how to get there, and it turns out that bus 628 left from the gate of the university and went right to the Old Summer Palace! We went to the bus stop indicated, and there was no bus 628 there. We walked down to the next stop on the line where there was also a second bus that went to the Old Summer Palace, but we didn’t really remember the number, and 628 wasn’t there either! We guessed as to the number of the alternate bus, and fortunately got it right, but when we got to our final destination, there was no bus 628 listed on the final bus stop! We just had a phantom bus experience, and fortunately it turned out well, but was so strange to not have the bus exist at all…

The Old Summer Palace is mostly a large park, which was lovely, but much more crowded than other parks we’ve been to, and the ruins were relatively unimpressive, so it was sort of a letdown, but at least it made for a quick afternoon trip, as it takes so long to get places here.

We also made an afternoon trip to the Forbidden City. It is on one side of Tianamen square, and you have to get to it by going in a tunnel under the street. All bags have to go through the scanner, and they patted down everyone that went in. Except, apparently, for foreigners. Very notably, they just waved us through, and every single other person in line (who were all Chinese) got patted down.

The Forbidden City was VAST! There were a lot of the main buildings that you think of, but then there are also alleys and houses off to all sides, along with enormous plazas, old fountains, canals, and one park. We thought a lot about the concubines that were there with their bound feet, and how they would have had to be carried around the whole thing- everything is so spread out, that they couldn’t walk that far, and if they wanted to go anywhere, even within the city, they would have to have someone take them, making them essentially prisoners in their own homes.

As we first got to the Forbidden City, it was very crowded and we were dodging tour groups, but fortunately we circled back around as we left, and found the front areas practically empty. It was nice to get to see it without so many people and to be able to imagine a bit more of the tranquility that the emperor and family were able to enjoy.

Now I see!

When we first got here, we were told that you could get prescription glasses for practically nothing in China, and that the place you could do that was right next to what is called the dirt market, where you can get antiques, authentic and otherwise, of all kinds. Accordingly, we planned an afternoon to make the excursion.

Our first stop was the glasses mall,
where it turned out that I could actually get glasses for practically nothing. I bought a pair of prescription sunglasses, and a pair of regular glasses for 350 Yuan, or about $55. The cute Chinese girls in the store, and Lori my co worker helped me to pick out some fun frames to try out. I always feel like I need to be conservative when spending hundreds of dollars on glasses at home, because it is an expensive risk if I don’t end up liking something. But for $20, I wanted something a bit more fun, so my new regular glasses are tortoise shell and lime green, and much larger than usual! It has been fun to try them out! It took them 2 hours to make the glasses, so we went over and spent the afternoon at the dirt market.

It was a shopping mecca with all kinds of different things, from artwork, to jewelry, to ceramics and fabrics, and most of it was cheap, and so fun to browse. The layout had a main building filled with real antiques, furniture and expensive artwork. Then there are small shops built into the walls that hold the next tier down in terms of quality and price. Then you get the stalls under the covered area, the blankets on the ground in the covered area, and the blankets on the ground in the “bring your own umbrella or swelter in the sun” area. Prices and quality dropped at each level, so depending on what we were looking for, the further we got from the main building, the less we paid for what we were buying. Mostly we just picked up a few trinkets, but had fun wandering and seeing what people were selling, and watching the other people shopping.

Hot, hot, hot and windy!

The summer palace is another place I visited and enjoyed, but never got around to posting about because I feel like I need to treat you to a lengthy essay on the history of the place, but although I foolishly purchased an audio guide, it was next to worthless, as it was supposed to tell from GPS where I was, and it didn’t. It also kept turning off, and when it did talk, it invariably repeated the same thing I heard at the very beginning and got deep into Buddhist philosophy in a poor English translation, and I got nothing out of it, even when it repeated itself. So, here’s the history of the summer palace: The emperor and family used to live there in the summer. The end. You can probably find a nice Wikipedia article on it to fill in the gaps. Maybe I should find that Wikipedia article so I know what I saw…

Here’s what I thought- it was a lovely setting, and lots of climbing: stairs, clambering up rocks, climbing hills, etc. The palace was beautiful and fun to see where people lived. There was one building where the empress lived that was furnished in the way she had it when she lived there, and it was amazing, but we didn’t actually get to go in, but could look at it through very dusty windows.

The interesting part of the excursion was that the summer palace was supposed to close at 6. At about 5:00, the clouds rolled in, and there was a lovely breeze coming from across the lake. At about 5:15, that nice breeze turned into a brisk and lively wind. At that point, they closed the doors to everything that didn’t lead out, closed all the little shops, including the place where I had to return my audio guide to get my deposit back (!) and shut down everything abruptly 40 minutes early. I wanted my 100 yuan deposit back, and really didn’t want my useless audio guide, but couldn’t find anyone to help me turn it in, since the kiosk had closed. I finally found a Chinese lady who was trying to do the same thing, and just followed her. By bullying any number of people, she found a kiosk that was closed, but still had a person in it, and made them take it back, so all was well, and it turned out to be a lovely adventure, if a bit quickly terminated.

I also took advantage of the bad weather to ride in this little bike rickshaw back to the subway station!

Botanic Gardens

Sometimes, I don’t have a lot to say about some of my excursions, and this is one of them. The botanic gardens in Beijing are nestled in the western hills, and have quite a bit of manicured forests, and fewer flowers than I would have expected. The tropical greenhouse was beautiful, as was the setting. Even though it was different than I would have thought, the experience was lovely, and I think the photos speak better than I can about it.