Xinjiang

My travelmates, Trenton and Kelli.












Last month, I spent 10 days in Xinjiang. On April 17, I left Nanjing and flew to Urumqi with Kelli to meet Trenton, who had flown out that morning. We spent one night there, then flew to Kashgar. After two days, we hired a driver and spent three days on the highway that runs through the Pamir Mountain Range to connect to Pakistan. Along the way, we spent one night sleeping in a Yurt next to Karakul Lake and another night in a Tashkurgan. We backtracked to Kashgar and after a few hours hopped a sleeper bus to Hotan. We spent two days and one night in Hotan than took an 18 hour bus that crossed the Taklamakan desert, which takes up a huge part of the province. The bus ended up back in Urumqi, where we bought hard sleeper tickets back to Nanjing. The train took 40 hours, traversing most of the country.

As my time is limited, I will mostly represent my journey through the pictures I took.

Urumqi



My mother had informed me the weather was volatile here, but we felt the full extent. When Trenton got here the previous morning it was sunny and 70 degrees. We arrived at night to rain and woke up to snow. Urumqi is a rather unexciting city, we spent most of our time ate the only expat hang out in town, drinking coffee and eating western food. That said, it was a relaxing starting and ending point for our trip. We did have an amazing Xinjiang specialty, Da Pan Ji (chicken, potatoes, peppers) for lunch on Day 2.

Kashgar

A bakery specializing in the Uighur Naan on one of the large streets in the minority dominated old city. Bread would be our main staple on our journey along the highway to Pakistan.











A bowl goat head at the night market across from the mosque. The three of us ate half a head, and it wasn't that bad.




















The livestock market, on the outskirts of town. We mostly saw sheep and cows with a few donkeys and goats too. Most people were chasing sheep around and tying them together by their necks with ropes tied to pickets in the ground.

Pamir Range (Karakul Lake and Tashkurgan)

This mountain is about 7500 meters tall, which isn't that much shorter than Everest. The reflection is in Karakul Lake, and the pictures all look like they are fake because it's so breathtaking. I was at 3800 meters and was feeling the altitude, which forced me to do everything really slowly.









The people renting us our yurt were giving us trouble about the food we were asking for. We ended up starting to walk around the lake and this Kyrg minority family offered to feed us for 10 kuai a head. Only the father, pictured here, knew Mandarin, and only a few words at that. The rice, veggies, and a couple bits of lamb meat were not that great, but it was well worth the experience of seeing how they live in this two room stone house.




The yurt we stayed in next to the lake. There was a wood stove that kept it warm. That went out at about midnight when all we had was about 30 blankets to keep us warm. They were so heavy they pinned us to the floor. Even so, I still woke up freezing.











Tashkurgan, the second to last city from the Pakistani border. The city has 50,000 residents, 30,000 of which are Tajik (remember, this is a really small city for China, Kashgar is 200,000). The generator at our hotel broke that night, so we subsisted on candles. We had some excellent Chinese food in this city, which we sought out because otherwise we had only been eating bread and lamb meat.






The "Ancient Stone City," basically abandoned ruins marked by a sign. I believe it's an old outpost. It's the highest vantage point in town from which I took the above picture. I was able to climb around on it freely. Definitely the highlight of Tashkurgan

Hotan

Hotan was a dusty city on the edge of the Taklamakan desert. The city of 100,000 had a very Chinese feel in most places and may well have been half-Chinese, half-minorities. Known for their jade, we spent most of our time jade shopping.

Back from Xinjiang

My apologies for not leaving a note about my leaving for Xinjiang province for 10 days. Midterms had me really swamped, and I left immediately afterwards on Thursday. I have a few hundred pictures to sort through and a couple essays to finish tomorrow, but I will prepare an epic post to match my epic vacation.

Beijing Weekend

Hopped an overnight soft sleeper to Beijing, arriving Friday morning 6:45. I was pseudo-traveling with three girls from Nanjing--Shirlene, Lisa, and Bethany. They took a different train there and stayed in a different hotel. Also from Nanjing, Alex's girlfriend, Zheng Yu, flew to Beijing, but stayed in my same hotel. We would all travel back together on the same train.





Beijing University has this enormous lake with a 10+ story pagoda on one side. Totally blows Nanjing University Campus out of the water.







I went to visit my friend Alex from CIEE Nanjing last semester whose birthday it was on Thursday. I stayed in this large hotel/dorm complex where most foreigners at Beijing University are housed. Forgot my passport, so spent my whole morning (like 3 hours) finding a fax machine, the fax being too unclear, and then having my roommate scan and e-mail it to me. It was well worth the trouble and the 260 kuai to stay in such a convenient and well-furnished location. I've had some very bad experiences with Beijing hostels in the past.

Had lunch in the nearby Korean area, Wudaokou. We ate Korean food, for which my love is increasingly growing. I would eat again on Sunday at a Korean restaurant in this area. Despite Nanjings plethora of Korean restaurants, none stood up to the two I ate at over the weekend.

After lunch, we went back to campus and had a mini-campus tour. The weather was beautiful because they had recently launched a weather rocket, which made it rain, and cleared away the pollution for a while. The campus was also amazing, replete with this huge lake and pagoda, lots of traditional architecture, and the library where Mao Zedong began developing his ideology.

Alex, a bunch of his friends, and I went out to a Thai restaurant for this guys birthday. It was a huge meal and included plenty of seafood. Then, we went to smoke a hookah at a bar in Houhai, a bar district that encompasses this lake, meaning there were hundreds of bars. Sat outside, had a beer, pretty low key night.

The next day, got my train back finally figured out, thanks to the three other girls in town. Every ticket vendor was saying there weren't any tickets for Sunday night arriving Monday morning. This was possible since it was a holiday weekend. Everyone had Friday off for Qingming Jie, what I call the clean-off-your-family-tomb-and-burn fake-money festival. Turns out, they were just all too lazy to check and assumed there wouldn't be tickets. The three girls successfully purchased me a ticket at the train station (a 60 kuai cab ride away).

That afternoon, I ate lunch at a restaurant called Lush in Wudaokou, best known for being open 24/7. It serves western style food that you might find at like a Denny's, but slightly better than that of course. I ate with Alex, his gf, and Caroline, another girl from the previous semester in Nanjing.

That afternoon, Alex, Zhengyu and I went to the Summer Palace. Apparently, the summer retreat for the rulers is built around the largest man-made lake. Read the wikipedia page for more. Took a boat across the lake and saw the huge marble boat that was commissioned by Empress Dowager Cixi, who pretty much controlled China through her son in the 1800's. The funds were supposed to be used on the Chinese navy, and this among many misappropriations account for a lot of Chinese military weakness at the time.




Me, Alex, and Zhengyu in the gardens at the Summer Palace.









That night we went to dinner at a pizza place called Kro's Nest. The pizza definitely is on par with US pizza and is the best I've had in China. The large's were huge, think bigger than a big new yorker, probably like 36 inches. I nearly completed a half, the fullest I've been this semester to the point of discomfort. Well worth it though. We went across town to have a drink with Alex's friends who were at another Kro's Nest location by coincidence. From there went to the Sanlitun (pronounced Sanlituar in a Beijing accent) to this place called Blue Bar. They had a great patio on the roof, so we sat up there and had more drinks. Afterward, went to China Doll next door, but that wasn't much fun. Late night, returned home at approximately 5 a.m.

On Sunday, I checked out of the hotel and, after lunch, went shopping in Wudaokou. I bought a pair of shoes at Hotwind, which was long overdue. Cost like US$40, and were pretty sweet, plus I apparently get lifetime repairs on them(?).

To that point, I had had a pretty epic cuisine experience that weekend--I only at Chinese food once for breakfast the first morning. But our last dinner on Friday was the piece de resistance. We ate at a pretty upscale Japanese restaurant. I had a couple pieces of thick sashimi as well as a dozen pieces of four different sushi. Topped off to perfection with an Asahi.

Returned back on a 9:3o p.m. train that arrived around 7 a.m. Monday. Just enough time to cab home, take a shower and go to class.

Busy week, this Thursday I have a speech class midterm. I'll update with how it goes.

Hangzhou

This Thursday after class, everyone got on a bus to go to Hangzhou, the capital of Zhejiang province. There's a saying in Chinese that there's heaven above and Hangzhou and Suzhou on earth. The city is known for it's gardens, parks, and the huge West Lake.

The bus ride took about 4 hours and was followed up by a meal at one of the 4 most reputable restaurants in town. We tried several Zhejiang dishes including a dish which was the equivalent to the western beggar's chicken, wrapped in leaves. Also had some fish in this odd sweet sauce that's supposedly a Zhejiang dish.

A guy in our program had friends in Hangzhou, so we checked out a couple bars with them that night. Seemed to have a pretty diverse selection, probably beats Nanjing slightly in terms of nightlife. I went from a Mexican restaurant/bar to a Reggae bar on to an intense dance club (there were lots of lasers) and back to the Reggae bar, where I proceeded to eat a pretty good hamburger.

Friday, we visited this huge park with this famous temple in it. I wish I could say something about the temple, but I didn't actually go inside, I just wandered around the park. I've seen so many temples, I'm almost templed-out, and there was plenty of other cool stuff to see. Particularly, all over were these Buddhas carved in the stones around the temple, sometimes high up in the rocks.



A cave entrance in the park with Buddhist carvings. We could pretty much go wherever so I walked through the interior and out another entrance.








I went through a cave, up these stairs in these rock formations an climbed the steps up this small mountain/hill thing. Hung out on top and wandered down the other side to see the temple complex rising through the trees on one side. It was very serene, I can only imagine how tranquil it would be before the city and tourism had grown.

Followed that up with a meal at Grandma's Kitchen, another of the 4 most reputable restaurants. I ate what probably was jellyfish as well as this fatty pork back, among many other things.


West Lake










Then we took a boat out to an island in West Lake. After that had some R&R, went to the Mexican restaurant for burritos, and out for the night.

Saturday morning, we went out to the tea growing mountains where we heard a lecture/sales pitch for this one type of tea. We all got to drink the tea, which was delicious, but not delicious enough for me to part with 150 to 300 kuai. Also learned about pouring tea, how it's grown/dried, different ways to steep it. The lecture was given by this spunky employee who's English was really good and at one point made a Brokeback Mountain joke. We then climbed an adjacent mountain with tiers of tea plants being grown.



Trenton tries and fails to take a picture with a tea picker. He later gave her 20 kuai, she promptly stopped working and walked off the mountain.








The program took us all to Papa John's (what?) for lunch and then we took the bus back home. That will round out my traveling until my 10 day break that starts on April 17, when I plan to go to Xinjiang.

Migrant School and Shanghai

We went to the migrant school Thursday afternoon and had to teach the kids for about an hour. Our group taught them "I'm a Little Teapot" and played hangman. We also tried to play this game outside, but that kind of failed. We were told the kids would be 8 to 10 years old, it is a primary school after all, but some claimed to be as old as like 14 or 15.

It was to be expected, kind of chaotic. At the start they were really well behaved, but "I'm a Little Teapot" definitely started to lose them. The school building was supposedly only a few years old, but certainly didn't look that way. I guess most of the kids there were from Anhui and Jiangsu (outside Nanjing) province. They proclaimed proudly how many students had graduated and gone on to middle school recently. I can't remember the exact numbers, but if that's something to be proud of, I wonder what a really bad school is like.

Right after that, I went to Shanghai with Jim, Tim, and (Dan) Butters. Jim was in the program last semester too, and his family had moved to Shanghai from Rochester when he was 10 years old. That said, we stayed at his family's apartment in a compound about a 45 minute ride west from the train station. Got there at like 10, ate leftover lasagna, played with his awesome British bulldog (which involved a marshmallow gun), played Xbox and were asleep by like 12:30.

The next day I woke up, put my suit on, printed off my resume and clips and headed toward the Jing'an Temple area closer to the center of the city for my internship interview. The guy was an hour late because he had to run out for something. Should know about the internship sometime this week. Met up with a large group of CIEE people who had arrived Friday afternoon. We went to a cheap noodle restaurant suggested by Jim's mom (who works for this expat guide/phone service thing). Then walked to the Bund to go to a bar called I Heart Shanghai. It was pretty dead so after one drink, we went to a bar called Mural, which had some "all you can drink for 100 kuai" thing. Not too exciting, met up with Jim/Tim and some of his friends, street food after. I would learn that night and the next night "open bar" also means watered down alcohol, which was pretty gross and led to me drinking beer. I end up sleeping on the floor in the CIEE hotel room with 6 other guys, Jim's place was an inconvenient taxi ride away.

Saturday, woke up showered and put my suit back on. We grabbed breakfast at the City Diner (banana pancakes) and in the afternoon went to the Shanghai Museum. The weather was great and we had to wait like 45 minutes to get in. The minority culture, currency, and sculpture exhibits were amazing. Around 5, finally made it back to Jim's to clean my self up and bring my stuff back to the hotel. For dinner, we went out to a Xinjiang restaurant and ordered what was probably a half to a quarter of lamb (we had pre-ordered a whole one but shown up late and they had already sold part of it). Still it was a TON of meat. They gave us gloves and we pretty much just dug in to a pile of roasted lamb, biting the meat away from the fat. It was pretty awesome. Had other dishes too, but most everything had lamb in it. Ping Ping and friends who live in Shanghai also came.

Then, we went to a club called Bon Bon for an all-you-can-drink thing for Lynn in our programs birthday. 120 kuai for guys, 80 for girls. We all had a shot of tequila for her birthday, which they interpreted as pouring half a glass out. Turns out, because it's watered down, probably was equivalent to a shot, just even more disgusting than normal tequila. So after that mostly drank the warm beer they had. Gotta make money somehow I guess. There was no place to sit, so we pretty much danced for the entire time from 10 to like 1:30 or 2 when we left. It was a pretty big place, had a hip-hop dance room and a techno dance room.

The next day, we went to an amazing restaurant called Element Fresh for brunch. I'd been there twice before, it pretty much serves really fresh, yuppie diner food to yuppies. Really good though, had an omlette, steak, fruit, toast, potatoes for 68 kuai. We ate outside in the sun since it was warm out and it was easily the most relaxing thing I've done in weeks. Caught the train back at 2:30 and studied.

Other than that, we went to an Irish-style Pub in the Sheraton Hotel for Saint Patty's Day. A normal Guinness cost as much as my Element Fresh meal, thank god we negotiated them down to 35 kuai since we were in a group. Seemed to be a lot of 40+ British dudes, I didn't know the British celebrated the holiday.

The Past Week

As usual, not a lot's been going on besides studying. This past weekend, I just did the usual hanging out thing. Spent one night at this bar with live jazz with most of the people in my program. On Friday, Ping Ping (our program assistant) had a party at her apartment, which was packed because her roommates also invited all of there friends. The over-crowded apartment reminded me of my freshman year, but in a good way. I guess. After that we went to a bar with Salsa dancing, although I admittedly only watched. I possess no actual talent, I have to take a dance class or something when I get back to the U.S. I spent Saturday working at the voice recording job again.

By Sunday morning, I was feeling slightly ill, this feeling I usually get before I get actually sick. No surprise really, everyone in the program has a bad cough, one girl had pink eye last week, another bronchitis, and my roommates been sick on and off for a week, sometimes with a fever. Rather than fight with the same advice I always get from Chinese people, I just went along with it this time. I'm wearing more clothes than I need to keep me warm and drinking only hot water. Might be doing the trick, haven't gotten actually sick yet although I still wake up with a sore throat.

On Sunday, I did go to an all you can eat sushi and teppanyaki restaurant for Shirlene's birthday. It was all you can eat for 150 kuai, so we gorged on steak, shrimp, fish, raw sashimi, etc. Almost gave me a meat coma. I followed up that fine dining experience by going to a place called Taj Mahal which had Indian food and was, surprisingly, actually run by Indian and/or Pakastani people. It was free too since enough of the Chinese roommates went that it counts as a "Target Language Meal" because we presumably spoke Chinese.

Last night, my roommate and I had like an hour long conversation in Chinese after we got on the topic of politics and foreign policy. It started off with how crazy Korean people are, or at least how some of their scholars think the way history went down. Ended up talking about Darfur, Taiwan, Kosovo, Bush, Clinton, Hillary, Iraq, oil, how the U.S. start's too many wars, how Jiang Zemin is a real "piece of shit" for not at least getting really mad about the U.S. plane bombing the Chinese embassy in Belgrade back in the '90s, how much of a badass Mao was before 1949 and how he screwed stuff up after. It was good, I'm starting to learn how to say all these things and it's funny to learn the Chinese pronunciations for these words which is funny sometimes (ex: Bush is BuShi). It tied in well with the vocab from newspaper articles I've been reading for my one-on-one class about China/Taiwan and most recently an article about Condi meeting with Hu Jintao.

Tomorrow, the program is going to a migrant primary school to volunteer in the afternoon. Pretty much, migrants move to the city's to find work, but they remain pretty much second class citizens, so there kids get second class schools. Each group of us is supposed to teach the kids a song, play a game, do a skit, story, something that is "American." We'll see how that goes, may have to brush up on "Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes."

Upon return from that I will leave promptly for Shanghai. On Friday, I have a "talk" with a guy about a magazine where I could possibly get an internship. Kind of hard to say what that will actually be like. Getting my suit coat sleeves shortened for an amazing 15 kuai repair, so that they'll be the right length for when I wear it at the interview and going out.

I'm already getting into minutia, but I'm at a loss for what to write. Still trying to update every week though.

I leave the U.S. and everything goes to hell...

Barack Obama still doesn't have the nomination, and now, Brett Favre retires!

Work/School

All I've been doing is studying and hanging out, nothing very interesting. On Thursday, we had our dinner/KTV extravaganza with our roommates, which was pretty standard. On Saturday, I worked for 6 hours at a english voice recording job, recording the listening section of 20 different tests. It was pretty mind numbing, we (Shirlene and I) got one 10 minute break in the middle. It was not enjoyable, but I did get paid 150 kuai (A little over $20 an hour). I may do it again this weekend since the money's so good.

The beginning of the week was heavy on homework. A dialogue for speaking class on Monday and several book exercises and a couple texts to read, 60 word vocab dictation test and a 400 character essay on Tuesday. Also on Tuesday, I had my first one-on-one reading class with my professor.

So I've been taking it easy since then. Looking forward to getting done with my last 2 hours of class tomorrow from 8-10 and then the weekend.