Xinjiang Fun, Catherine's Chinese Fun, Bizarre Dream Fun: Part I
Ok Kids, it has been a while since I posted, so I have decided to play catchup in a massive way. There are three stories that I want to catch people up on, and I'm not sure how to title them in such a way that people will read all three as they are equally important, so I am just got to post them as one massive blog entry in three pieces. If you are bored with one, just skip it and you can check out the next one. So there are three pieces to this puzzle:
1) My recent trip to XinJiang
2) My friend Catherine's Fun with practising Chinese
3) The bizarre dream I had recently and some other bizarre dreams - you get to psychoanalyze me, which is always good as I hate to pay for therapy but free therapy online is worth every cent!
TRIP TO XINJIANG!
So I finally made it through the passport insanity and was able to fly to XinJiang. Sadly I had to skip the Kashgar leg of the trip, which would have been super fun, but instead met up with Lisa "Brown Girl", who is an old friend that I have known for almost ten years, but whom I have only met in person probably about six times. Anyway, we met in college through Model UN (one of the pillars to my three legged "dork stool" that was my life whilst in high school and college, but at least in college the trips were free) and subsequently saw eachother another two or three times, followed by about 7 years of infrequent emails and then finally meeting again in NYC last summer. I saw her again a couple times since coming to Beijing (she lives in Shanghai but is a freelance writer and the reason I was able to go to the weird Paul Smith fashion show here). Anyway, we made plans to go with her friend Anh-Thu (who looks frighteningly similar to my friend Betsy while at the same time completely different!) to XinJiang, "the land of song and dance" as well as "the land of honey and wine".
Couple of things to note about XinJiang:
1) Its technically an "autonomous region" in China, much like Tibet, which means that it was as one point "aqcuired" by the PRC
2) The majority of people in XinJiang are not Han Chinese, they're Uighur, which is a turkic central asian ethnic group that is predominantly muslim
3) There are also random Kazakhs and Khyrg people in parts of Xinjiang
4) Since most of the Uighur's are to some degree a mix of the caucasian and chinese, many of them look a lot like yours truly (except not as pretty)
5) Xinjiang is the midpoint of the famous "Silk Road" that connects China with the middle east
So these were all things that I knew before I made the trip. However, I soon learned a number of fun facts upon arrival. These included:
1) The Uighur women was very "sturdy" (read: buxom) with a penchant for wearing what westerners would consider evening gowns during the day, covered in shiny/sparkly things like sequins
2) While many of the Kazahks remain pastoral nomads and live in yurts, they're not like the amish, and Karaoke is a perfectly acceptable form of entertainment
3) Be wary of any restaurant that has no menu and responds when you ask about prices with "i'll give you a good price"
About that, so on day 3 we went to Tian Chi, which is this supposedly beautiful lake in the Tian Shan mountain range of northern XinJiang. After a 3 hour car ride, we finally got there to discover that the whole area was covered in a thick mist (ie. pea soup). Our visibility was about 30 feet. It was a lot like the fields of bunnies from my childhood (if you don't know what Im talking about, read some of my other posts). Anyway, we basically couldn't see anything, took the supposedly 30-minute trek up the steps to get to the lake (more like 90 minute), realized that we wouldn't be seeing any lake (literally...it was there, we just couldn't see it...i'll post the sadly comedic pictures of us next to the big "nothing" that reminded us of the Neverending Story, except I was Atreyu or Bastian but short one friendly luck dragon...) and decided to park our asses in a yurt for some grub. So the not unnactractive Kazahk women doesn't give us clear prices on food, and we end up ordering what we think is about 60 kuai worth of stuff. The food comes out, all of which is pretty mediocre except for the milk tea, which is apparently similar to the tibetan yak-butter tea. While not bad, it doesn't really taste like tea and in my humble opinion tastes more like Campbell's cream of mushroom soup with extra salt. ANYWAY, bill comes and the woman wants 200 kuai! Why? Apparently there is a 100 kuai fee for "renting the yurt" and she charged us 15 kuai PER FISH that was included in our gross fish soup! So one extra loud shouting match between Lisa and the woman (i think Lisa's command of mandarin was better than the kazahk girl's) and we're on our way without paying anything! We refused the 200 kuai, offering 70, which is 10 more than what itsould have been, to which the woman replied that if we're not going to pay the whole amount she doesn't want our money. Apparently this is a ploy that works with the "face saving" Chinese who would then either a) not want it to look like the money is worth more than their pride and would therefore pay the full amount just as an "F*ck U" to the restaurant or b) feel guilty for just walking off without paying. Fortunately we were all three americans and neither of these cultural snafus applied to us. We stormed off. Later the woman's brother found us and we gave him the 70 kuai...apparently he's the peachemaker of the bunch. I'll never look at a yurt the same way again!
So aside from that, the trip was pretty breezy and good fun, punctuated by wandering through markets and ancient ruins, drinking beer and eating nan bread, and enjoying lots of lamb. Also I had the pleasure of seeing THE WORST BATHROOM IN CHINA, which is definitely a hotly contested title. The winner: it was literally a set of boards placed on the side of a mountain with a little playpen around it. I have a picture. Good trip? Definitely.
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