The Silk Road: humble beginnings

As the Silk Road was a 17 day long journey, there is no way I can get though it all in one sitting. After all it's taken me all of two weeks to even get started thanks to the hen mang lifestyle that I've settled into here. (hen mang- very busy) But keep checking, and I'll be sure to keep updating. And as I can not even begin to include all the pictures I've taken, I'm working on opening a more easily accessible account on flicker or snapfish or something, so be on the look out for that.

Okay. The Silk Road. Let's just jump right in:

Day One. 8/16

We left Beijing on flight to Urumqi at 12:55. Urumqi is in the Xinjiang province in western China, see below.

Urumqi was immediately different from Beijing. For one thing, the sky was clear and blue, and in the distance beyond the clearly very urban city was a stretch of desert, and a mountain range. I'd essentially grown used to not understanding any store signs, road signs, marketing of any kind, but my confusion only increased here with the realization that in Urumqi, as in most all of Xinjiang, they don't speak Chinese; they speak Uygur. Uygur looks somewhat Arabic, but it's not. Xinjiang is also primarily Muslim, with the city Urumqi itself being over 60%. So from this day forward we started seeing a lot of Mosques.

Not unlike my tour of German churches thanks to a certain German teacher who shall remain nameless.

After checking into our hotel -which had a questionable supply of "sexual enhancers" available for purchase from the mini-bar- we met up with our Urumqi host students from the city's primary university. I was in a group led by Arslan and Dijur and they set off to take us out to very traditional Uygur food at a restaurant that turned out to be very popular. Twenty minutes after we got there two more TBC groups showed up, completely unplanned.

We had a number of new interesting dishes including lamb's lung, intestine, and Uygur pizza= with lamb of course. And most importantly, our first (of many) Kebabs.
After dinner we wandered the city to the International Night Market, once again, the first of many night markets. We saw our first live camel, and Bazaar. Then after the brief consideration that we were told not to eat dairy products bought in open air markets, we had some Uygur icecream, that may or may not have had egg in it.

Don't worry though, I didn't get sick, yet...

That evening back at the hotel I had my first Baijou experience. Baijou became a somewhat significant part of our lives on the Silk Road, which is why it is worth mentioning. Baijou (pronounce By-Joe) is "the wine of the Emperor" it can cost up to 500 RMB for a good bottle. Although personally I think you can't find a good bottle because it is disgusting.
We had it while watching a, wait for it, -
Dinosaur/Ninja movie.
Yes, the Ninjas were fighting the dinosaurs. That plus the Baijou, plus the repeated calls for "you want massagie?" made our first night quite an experience. Mind you if girls answered those calls, they just hung up. Interesting..

Day 2. 8/17

Our first stop of the day was to the Xinjiang Autonomous Region Museum where we saw the infamous Urumqi mummies. These mummies are thousands of years older than the oldest of Egyptian Mummies, and through no fault of the Egyptian people, much more well preserved than their mummies. They also are oddly Indo-European looking, which has caused quite a stir in quite a number of intellectual communities since these were unearthed in the early 90's.

Our next stop, and definitely one of the highlights of our entire Silk Road adventure was our home-stay at Tianchi. Tianchi, more commonly known as, "Heavenly Lake" is the current home of the nomadic Kazak people. They live in yurts for the summer and then migrate to cities, generally Urumqi, during the winter months. Yurts are like larger tepees lined with rugs and this community was kind enough to welcome 50 of us to their homes. (Although I'm sure they were some how compensated.)

They literally butchered and roasted two lambs for our dinner/feast, and were unbelievably hospitable. They yurt I stayed at with 7 total TBC students (and Father Gene) was owned by a family with two small children. Actually there were a surprising number of children in their little village- and when I say village I mean a total of 7 yurts, 5 of which they cleared out of to allow us some extra space. In general, the children that we saw along the entire trip were probably one of my favorite parts.

The lake itself was, well, heavenly. And as Habib said(our tour guide for the first 5 or so days of the trip, also in himself one of the highlights of the Silk Road) "You are heavenly tourists, on a heavenly tour to the heavenly lake and the heavenly mountain." The statue is of the Immortal Mother, a Taoist belief/goddess, and on an opposing bank of the lake was actually a Taoist monastery. (Though you can't see it here)

.One of the other highlights of the evening was the performance by two musicians playing a traditional Kazak instrument, the Dongbula. If I knew how to add videos, I would put one here, because not only was it beautiful music, but their fingers were moving so fast that I could hardly even comprehend it

Day 3. 8/18

This day brought us to our most permanent home of any on the Silk Road, Turpan. The reason I suggest permanence of our residence in Turpan is because we spent 4 days there, which is the longest period of time we spent in one place in about 3 weeks, including our first days in Beijing. Turpan has claim to the lowest point in all of China. And after a night at the fairly high altitude of Heavenly Mountain, it was yet another adjustment to get used the drastic change. Turpan was fairly interesting, especially our first day or so there.

The event of the day was Jiaohe ancient city. The city was inherently spooky besides all of our goofing off and naturally light moods. It's just very odd to wander up and down what were clearly once bustling streets full of people, and markets, animals, most likely with waste flowing down the sides. And now there are only Chinese tourists, and us of course. One area is even called the 'Baby Graveyard' because over 30 infant corpses were unearthed when the city was first excavated. There is no historical record or reference even as to what caused the deaths, but it's presumably some disease that could have run through the area. Still it was a beautiful day, and beyond the city was a canyon and acres of vineyards, Turpan is known for its grapes. (Over 600 different kinds, claimed Habib)

Besides the ancient city day 3 was mainly travel and checking-in type nonsense, but the night market (like I said about the night markets) was a lot of fun. Danny and Jon and I wandered around aimlessly taste-testing things, and just enjoying the exploration.

I think coming soon will be an inventory of my friends here, so as to make this all less confusing.

That's all there is for present, but don't fret there are 2 more week's worth of adventures to come in the next few days.

Welcome to China

I brush my teeth with Evion.

I also throw up on theGreat Wall of China, but come on, you win some you lose some.

---Disclosure: I wrote this post around 4 am (my time) Sunday morning and saved it in a word document because I haven't been able to get to the internet until now---

I’m not really sure what I expected of China, somehow I feel as though I had no expectations at all. Which is probably a good way to go into something like this because then there can be no disappointments and only surprises. SuRprises.

Everyone is amazingly nice so far, there are under 5 people that I can’t see myself being good friends with. And besides them there are tons of people that I already adore and can’t wait to be closer to.

Bobby is probably the sweetest guy here. He hung out with me all day yesterday while I was a complete mess, he carried my backpack and rubbed my back while I was sick. I couldn’t believe that after knowing each other for all of 4 days he was so willing to just take care of me when he could have been off galavanting along the Great Wall of China.
Also, he goes to SLU, as do a total of 12 students, none of whom I knew before this week.

Liz I think is my closest girlfriend, she and I are so much alike. She is from Appleton (Yeah Spage I KNOW!) but goes to Loyola Chicago. Also she loves coffee, Metropolis especially, which the Buzz used to sell. I told her that she should come to St. Louis because Kaldi’s is better.

My roommate’s name is Lisa (Ma Elisa) she is from Manilla. There are 8 students from her school in the Phillipeans and they are all really nice and speak perfect English. Also she has an iBook, the 11 inch. So we match. She does come up to around my chest though, but it’s not as if I wasn’t expecting to be tall here.

Brian is another SLU student and is, no joke, 6 ft 8” Plus he’s blonde. So naturally he gets stared at all the time. Brian I think is maybe my favorite on the trip. Except Bobby of course.

Using the internet here is really rough, and I probably won’t be able to put this post up for a few days. We have ethernet connection in our rooms but they cannot access international, or US websites without a proxy code. And I don’t know what a proxy code is. Our host students were supposed to be able to help us, but he didn’t really have any idea.

Allen is my host student. He is a really cool kid, very nice, but from a small town in some southern province. To get to school here he takes a 22 hour train ride. His small-town-ness is probably why he isn’t very knowledgeable about our internet problems and things like that. We asked him what movies he liked and he said, Titanic and Pearl Harbor.

Also when he said that this girl next to me, Morganne, who goes to Georgetown, said, sincerely, “Pearl Harbor is my absolute favorite movie.”
She wasn’t just being nice either.


Anyways…
The first thing you notice about Beijing, about China in general, is the pollution. There is a thick smog over everything and it is almost impossible to even see the sun. And when you do find it, it is like looking at the moon because you can stare directly at it with out any difficulty.

It’s kind of hard to adjust to the air, and Peg, the director said that if you plan to go running or anything like that, make sure you cut it down a few miles. I’m too scared to go out running yet though. I think I would get lost. Even though the campus is just a square, with N S E W gates, it’s in a very crowded area and I am just too much of a chicken. (Insert chicken dance here)
Even on the Great Wall it was only a little better than the air in the city, and I don’t understand how postcards of the wall have such blue skies because I can’t even imagine it being anything but grey.

Despite the fact that I couldn’t even keep down water I had a good time at the wall. There was a market strip on the way to the entrance to the wall and I was able to try my hand at bargaining and I picked up a few things including a jade Buddah for Susan. Chances are it isn’t actually Jade though. I also got a messenger type bag with Mao on it, and I love it. It’s the best thing. Bargaining is really fun though and I expect to get much better at it as time goes on. It was rough because I instantly wanted everything I saw. But apparently they have the same things everywhere, and the Wall has much higher prices then everywhere else. I kind of wish I had gotten an “I climbed the wall shirt,” but I’m sure I’ll find it somewhere. After a while I just didn’t even feel up to arguing with these people and paid 10 quai for a bottle of water. Which is only like $1.25 but it should have only been like 2 quai. I was exhausted though, and just didn’t care.

Also it’s difficult to know what we’re allowed to eat and not. For example we’re not supposed to eat ice ever, and at a bar we went to I asked for no ice very diligently, BUT, then some kid told us that the bar boils their water before they freeze it, so that in restaurants it’s generally okay to take ice. So how do I know whom to believe?
I think for now I’m just going to play everything on the safe side.

I’m really going to miss salad though. We can’t eat lettuce or celery or tomatoes, anything without a major peel like watermelons or oranges. For those reasons watermelons are really popular here. So it’s a good thing I love it.

The food we have besides that is good though, and I’m using chopsticks just fine. I do expect to be tired of it reasonably quickly though. 3 meals in and I had already been ordered the same cooked spinach mess every time. And I haven’t found anything I really love yet. Also using chopsticks so much cramps up my hand after a while, but I should get used to it soon enough.

I haven’t yet had to use any non-western style bathrooms. Because we’re in the international students dorm we have regular toilets and everything like that, the embassy bar had western toilets also. Besides that all the buildings on campus just have holes in the ground, and I am not very excited about that. And we do need to carry toilet paper with us. Especially next week when we leave for the silk road trip. Fortunately it’s not like you can’t buy toilet paper here and Lisa and I both came home with a package of like 12 each the first day we went out. So we’re set.

When I got back from the Great Wall at around 3pm I passed out until like 1 am. Now as it is almost 2am I think I’m going to take a year long shower- which don’t worry is not a big deal because we have a water limit per month and we’re only going to be here a few more days, so August is really up for grabs. Anyways I’m going to clean myself up and then clean or something, I don’t know.

At least I feel better.