Retractions, Walnuts, Kebabs and the Contest

The World is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page. ~St. Augustine

Okay, all of that stuff I said about settling into a relaxing routing was absolutely wrong.

It was the calm before the storm.

After I wrote that, everything happened....at once.

About a week after my last post we had the Mid-Autumn Festival (sometimes called the Moon Festival as it is held during the full moon in September.) It is a harvest-type celebration for families to get together to eat moon cakes, a small, baked, sesame seed cake filled with sweets (fig, fruit, etc.) or meat. They are pretty dense, but not too bad to eat. Families eat and go outside to look at the moon together. If you are far from home you are still supposed to look at the moon and remind yourself that even though the world is a big place, we all see the same moon. It allows a connection to our loved ones who are far away...even all the way over in America.

So we were given 93749387493765 moon cakes and invited to several of our students' parties. We had a nice time and there was singing, dancing, eating and games. It was great to see the students so relaxed and happy together.

During that very same week, our little town of Chengxian (成县 pronounced 'chung-she-en',) held the first-annual Walnut Festival. As Michelle alluded in her blog, our home is famous for growing walnuts and the festival was created to bring a little good pub' this way. So to do this they held a giant festival complete with walnut art, fine fruits (One man grabbed me and whisked me over to his booth and refused to let me leave until I took some fruit, I walked away with a Mandarin orange, pomegranate, and persimmon,) and other goods for sale. The town also had a huge nationally televised (or so I hear) concert complete with eight very famous Chinese music stars. It was akin to having some of the most famous music stars in America give a concert in Kuna. Tickets were *very* spendy and all of our students wanted to go but couldn't afford them. The school bought tickets for us as a gesture of good will. It was really nice of them to do such a thing but we didn't really know any of these performers and felt bad that we were going (The tickets cost $40 each in American money!) while our students couldn't; but go we did and it was an experience to remember. We arrived in a drizzling rain and found that over 10,000 people had massed at the single gate to try to get into the show. There was a giant press of people and we foolishly waded into it. Soon we were swept up in the crowd. The crush of people was so severe that I found it hard to get air into my lungs. Police in riot gear were pushing the crowd around and some people began to panic so we backed off to wait for a while. A police officer saw us waiting and whisked us through another secret entrance and we managed to avoid the press. Our expensive seats turned out to be so far from the stage that we couldn't actually see what was going on.

We stayed for a while and listened to the music, but the rain began to pour harder so we ultimately decided to go home. After the show there was an amazing fireworks display. The Chinese can do wonders with fireworks. I have never seen an equivalent show in any U.S. city, large or small, as those that I've seen here, in little Chengxian.

After the Walnut Festival activities ended, the second holiday took place: National Day. This is the equivalent of our 4th of July and the schools close for the entire week. We took the opportunity to travel of course! We went to the northwestern most province in China, called Xinjiang (新疆).

Our first stop was the city of Kashgar (喀什, or Kashi in Chinese.) This city is the westernmost in China and very close to the Kyrgyzstan border. The Uygher minority make up about 89% of the population of Kashgar and they are quite different from the Han Chinese ethnic group that most people associate with living in China. Their appearance is different, they have their own language (a Turkic-based language, also called Uygher,) along with a host of other differences. It was really quite interesting to go to a place where I had to use my second language to speak to someone else in their second language. It made an already difficult task that much harder. Be that as it may, we managed to communicate with most people fairly well. When the language barrier problem presented itself we resorted to charades and that seemed to do the trick. Kashgar was a major stop along the Silk Road and even Marco Polo stopped in the town in his travels. Now it is famous for spices, handcrafted knives (which nearly every man carries under his coat) and delicious barbecued mutton and beef (mostly in the form of kebabs.) We visited a number of mosques and tombs in this majority Muslim area and enjoyed the people and sites very much.

From there we traveled back east to the city of Urumqi (乌鲁木齐, or Wulumuqi in Chinese.)
Urumqi is the provincial capital and it has about 2.7 million people, or just smaller than the city of Chicago. It was a huge city and has the distinction of being the world's farthest city from any ocean. So if you are afraid of the ocean, this is the place for you. It also happens to be the home of the geographical center of Asia. I sat in the exact center of Asia. It was cool. Actually, to be honest, it was cold, really cold. The city has a very cool climate and at this time of year it is downright chilly. We weren't quite prepared for this as we'd packed most of our desert-friendly, warm weather clothes after hearing about the climate and found that we were ill prepared.

While we were there we met up with one of my students, Sally, and her family. They showed us around town and fed us a huge meal of kebabs. Michelle didn't care for them very much so she surreptitiously slipped her food onto my plate and during the meal I essentially ended up eating an entire sheep. Despite the terrible stomach ache and years I may have peeled off my life by ingesting so much meat, it was sooooooooo worth it!

From there we went to the city of Turpan (吐魯番, or Tulufan in Chinese.) Turpan, which is about 2 hours southeast of Urumqi, has its own claim to fame. It is home to the second lowest point on earth after the Dead Sea. That means where only two hours ago we were freezing to death, now we were roasting in very warm temperatures. Turpan is famous for grapes and raisins. We also saw the Jiaohe Ruins which are the remains of a city that was around from 108BC to 450AD, and a museum dedicated to the karez, an ancient water system designed to bring underground water to the surface without the use of pumps. The karez is the reason Turpan was able to be settled and is very important to the city. If you are interested in engineering, history, or just plain ol' creativity it is an interesting concept. The city was beautiful and many of the roadways were shaded by grape trellises that happened to be full of ripened grapes at the time we went.

From there we flew back to the city of Lanzhou where Shell and I caught a bus back home, or tried to anyway. There were several mudslides on the road and we were forced to go over a bumpy mountain pass which made many of the women on the bus car sick. There is nothing quite like hearing multiple people retching for hours on end to make you dislike a bus ride. Out of boredom I kept track of the sickness of the two ladies who sat in front of us. The younger one won, 4 barfs to 3, but honorable mention goes to the younger girl next to them with a respectable 2. A bus ride that normally took about 7 hours ended up taking about 11 and we were exhausted when we got home.

We did come home to good news though, our internet is up and working at home again. After months and months in the internet bar, it feels good to type from home again.

Well I'm off, be safe!