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.