The Muddy Waters

In the kitchen

    Since coming back to Oxford, I have been trying harder to get in the kitchen and make a lot of food.  Although I love eating Chinese and Korean food when I'm in Asia, I miss American-style cooking and the dishes that I grew up eating.  In China, I do without the ovens, the pots, the spices, and many of the packaged foods that we use for European and American cooking.  So while I'm here, I'd better take advantage of what I've got.  Since this is the first semester that I have lived off campus, it's also the first semester that I have access to a real kitchen.  I'm enjoying it!  Though I still enjoy spending hours in the kitchen on weekends, I've recently been trying to cook faster, lighter food--I'm putting less emphasis on the complicated things that I like to practice when I'm at home.

Mandarin orange sorbet, a successful experiment from last year.

    Food is such an important part of my life.  Literally, it fuels my body.  Yet more so than that, I associate specific foods with the places and the people that I interact with.  Many of my memories of travel and friends are related to food.  Sometimes I can't remember a name or a detail from traveling, but I always remember a flavor!  Looking back over my pictures from Korea, I'm embarrassed to say that I may have taken more pictures of the food than of Seoul...and when I had the chance to take an extra-curricular class in China, I jumped at the chance to take a cooking class with Chen Lei Lei Laoshi. 
    Learning how to cook with Chinese ingredients and techniques has been a major part of my assimilation process.  The first time I went to China, I enjoyed eating lots of Chinese foods.  Yet I often ate at Western-style restaurants or looked for familiar snacks to store away in my room.  I have gradually shifted from constantly craving "Western" food, to enjoying the variety of foods available in China, to cooking my own versions of the Chinese foods around me.  Reaching higher levels of Chinese language proficiency has helped me better understand ingredients, recipes, and directions.  That's one reason I feel more content living in China than I used to.  In a way, the acceptance of Chinese food and cooking culture represents my path towards acceptance of the drastic changes in lifestyle that I have to make when I live in China.
    Chinese food is very different from American food (and no, your local China Royal doesn't count as Chinese). Almost all of it is stir-fried or steamed.  Much of it, unfortunately, is pretty oily.  Chinese cooking developed when most Chinese people lacked the resources to cook with lots of fuel.  Therefore, the heating/cooking over flame steps are usually very short.  The prep work is extensive (everything must be chopped, diced, and marinated, ready to stir-fry in a wok).  There is no one "Chinese cuisine".  There are eight major regional cuisines.  Some are spicy, some are very mild and light...some emphasize seafoods, others emphasize meat.  Variety is key for Chinese food.  On average, there are more varieties of fresh foods available in Chinese markets than American markets.  Winter melons, daikon radish, bok choy, bamboo shoots, persimmons, ducks, Asian pears, tons of mushrooms, lychees, and pickled vegetables are some of the ingredients you're likely to see in a neighborhood market.  There's dozens of types of tofu in one place.  You're also more likely to see live ingredients, including live sea creatures and live poultry.  The good thing is, they'll take care of the dirty business of killing, cleaning and gutting if you can remember to ask...

 

Live seafood stalls:  not coming soon to the neighborhood Kroger

    I'm an adventurous eater.  I've never been picky.  Yet eating Chinese food requires major adjustments for Americans.  Most meats aren't de-boned, including bony fishes.  Filets and cutlets are non-existent--whole birds and bone-in cuts are the norm.  Most foods are not organic, but they aren't the giant-sized, beautifully colored, genetically altered foods often found in US supermarkets.  Chickens aren't really plump.  Vegetables are smaller and thinner.  You're also more likely to run into foods that you wouldn't eat in the US, including animal organs and insects.  Some of these things used to bother me when I first traveled to China.  "I don't want to pick these tiny bones out of the fish!"  "Tofu AGAIN?"  "I thought only pandas ate bamboo..." "that looks scary..."  I can remember thinking all these things.  Ever since I started traveling, I have adhered to the "At Least One Time" rule:  if offered, I must eat something at least once and give it a fair shot.  After that, I can turn it down. Even though the spirit of the rule was openness to new things, there still used to be a lot of things I only ate once. 

    But this past time, for whatever reason, I felt much more comfortable with Chinese food.  I like more types of tofu now.  I've eaten lots of animal parts and picked out my own fish from tanks.  I was more eager to explore new dishes and cuisines.  Instead of fighting against the differences, cursing the lack of hummus and Tex-Mex and Italian pasta, I accepted them.  I ate a lot better than I used to, and I enjoyed exploring new things.  When I went out with my Chinese friends, they also didn't worry about "would she eat that?"  They knew I would eat almost everything they wanted to eat.  A major source of culture shock for me seemed to disappear over the course of the fall.

    Now I even find myself wistful, wishing that I could pick out a fresh fish...hoping that Kroger will stock winter bamboo shoots...looking for my favorite type of tofu...but I'll have plenty of time to look for those things the next time I go to China. For now, I think I'll stick to enjoying the things I can't get in China:  my favorite homestyle foods, Mississippi catfish, treats from Bottletree bakery, and mmmm, donuts.

John Leighton Stuart

    Before I left Hangzhou, I wanted to visit John Leighton Stuart's house.  John L. Stuart was the last US Ambassador to China in the pre-1949 days.  He was born to missionary parents in Hangzhou, and he could speak Mandarin, Hangzhou dialect, and English fluently.  Unfortunately, the time that he served as an ambassador was one of the most tumultuous times for Chinese-American relations.  Although he spent much of his life on the mainland, and was even jailed for supporting the Chinese fighting against the Japanese, he was the ambassador at the time that the US supported the Nationalists.  Mao Zedong mocked him in the essay <<Farewell, Leighton Stuart!>>. He returned to the United States in 1949, suffered a stroke, and died in 1962.  In his will he asked to be buried at Yenjing University in Beijing.  In November 2008 his ashes were returned to Hangzhou, his birthplace. 
    I tried to find his grave, but I was unsuccessful.  His house was on a tiny side lane of the biggest street in Hangzhou. Down Jesus Church Lane, I found a little bust of John Leighton Stuart.  Wandering around, I found the entrance to his house.  The house is a large, two story Chinese-American building.  Rather nondescript, except that it is marked as a historical residence.  There was no entry fee, and only one woman watched over the entrance.  I was free to wander around alone.
    There wasn't a whole lot in the house.  Some paintings of Jesus (I think newer ones, not originals) hung on the first floor.  There were also some pictures of his early life in China.  The second floor housed the more interesting artifacts--his honorary Hangzhou citizenship, his doctoral robes, and gifts given to him from Chinese friends.  There's a picture of JL Stuart meeting Zhou Enlai, lots of paintings given to Stuart, etc.  One whole room is devoted to original paintings delivered to Stuart for his 70th birthday.  Kind of like elegant Chinese birthday cards!

I wish I got elegant paintings like these for my birthday.

John Leighton Stuart is one of the most famous foreigners who lived much of his life in China, but far from the only one.  Several foreigners have lived most of their lives in China, or even become Chinese citizens.  Of course, the Jesuits were some of the first to arrive to China.  They didn't make much headway converting the Chinese to Catholicism.  A later wave of Protestant missionaries arrived after the two Opium Wars.  Pearl S. Buck, author of middle school reading list favorite The Good Earth, was born in the US but spent much of her life in Jiangsu province and Anhui province.   Many Westerners came to China in the 1930s, supportive of the Chinese Communists.  George Hatem, Israel Epstein, Anna Louise Strong, Joan Hinton, and Sidney Shapiro are a few of about 400 foreigners who were "foreign experts" remaining in China before the Cultural Revolution (the number dropped down to 59 during the revolution).
   


**Several Western news sources said <<Farewell, John Leighton Stuart>> is "an article students must memorize and recite to this day", but the 19-24 year olds I live with were only vaguely familiar with JLS's Chinese name.

Baidu entry on Si Tu Lei Deng (Chinese)
Baidu, Mao Zedong's <Farewell, John L. Stuart!> (Chinese)
Washington Times article on JLS's burial
NYTimes article on John Leighton Stuart's burial

The Expatriate:  article on Sidney Shapiro's experience in China

Suzhou

    For Thanksgiving weekend, I went to Suzhou, in Jiangsu province.  It's a two hour bus ride away from Hangzhou.  According to the Suzhou city website, Suzhou has a history of over 4000 years.  Suzhou "the city" was founded in 514 BCE.  The city is famous for its classical gardens and its canals.  There are over 60 preserved classical gardens, nine of which are UNESCO World Heritage Sites.  Visiting in November was rewarding.  The temperature was cool and comfortable, and the leaves were at their Fall best. 

    We visited several gardens and two pagodas.  First we left our hotel and made our way around the canals.  We ended up wandering off the "tourist" area and into the regular neighborhoods.  Just a few hundred feet away from the beaten path, thousands of people live right next to the old canals.  We stopped and grabbed Suzhou snacks, sweet cakes and dumplings.   Everywhere we went, there were shops and stalls selling fresh made foods.  We ate Suzhou dumplings.  My favorite snack was a sweet hotcake that we bought fresh out of the oven.  (Suzhou gets an A++ for snacks)  The canals were not really that pretty...the houses are a little dirty, the water's not really clear either....but seeing what life is like on the canals was fun.  Here's a hint:  you know if you're in an untouched area because the houses are right on the water, like this picture:

Tourists want to walk along the water, so in touristy areas or in rebuilt towns, planners will move the houses back and create paths that run along the water (like some parts of Xitang, where tourism has booned since a part of MI:3 was filmed there).  In the original towns, people wanted to live right on the water--because in the days before spigots and running water, they would use it!
    Then we took a detour to see something only I was interested in seeing:  the Suzhou Silk embroidery workshop.  Suzhou is famous for its silk embroidery.  One of the workshops where women still work by hand is open to the public.  We went and had a look.  It's located in a former residence and garden.  The whole area is very low-key.  There wasn't much to the workshop itself, not even many explanations or exhibits or even a good shop.  The place was mostly inhabited by lots of cats basking in the sun.  But we followed the sound of women's laughter, went upstairs, and found a huge room with about a dozen women working on silk embroidery.  Several were busy sewing a huge mural of bamboo, entirely done with real silk thread.  They said the mural, which I would guess was about 6 feet by 12 feet, would take over a year of work to finish. 


    After seeing the museum, we made our way over to Tiger Hill.  The fall leaves were stunning!  Tiger Hill has lots of things to see.  There's a large bamboo grove, lots of historical calligraphy, and even a small tea plantation and teahouse.  The bottom of the hill was swirling with tourists on this beautiful fall daOn top of Tiger Hill is a big, leaning pagoda.  Like a Pagoda of Pisa.  It leans so much that people can't go in it anymore.   Unfortunately, the pagoda is mostly faded.  I did enjoy seeing it, however, because it is well preserved and it seems like it has been spared the total overhauls/"touchups" that a lot of historical sites get in China. 

    Later that day, we visited the Lingering Garden (留园), one of the gardens collectively designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.  We studied garden architecture in my Hangzhou studies class, so I enjoyed seeing a much bigger and elaborate version of what we studied.  That weekend, we also made it to the Master of the Nets garden.  The gardens are best to visit early in the morning or late in the afternoon, when there aren't so many people milling about.  When it's empty, you can see all the little details that make the gardens so special.  The elaborate carvings above doorways.  Caves carved into the garden rocks.  Reflections gleaming in the waters.  Elaborate patterns of tiles on the ground.

 

The last thing we visited before leaving Suzhou was the Twin Pagodas.  Twin pagodas are rare in China.  These two are completely surrounded by a Suzhou neighborhood.  In fact, we had trouble finding our way to the pagodas.  We saw the tops, but couldn't find the entrance!  We made a complete circle around them before finding a path that led to them.  We were the only tourists there.
    A little girl talked to us when we came in.  She asked us why we had to pay for tickets--Suzhou residents get in for free!  Um, we're not Suzhou residents...we told her.  We're.....also not Chinese.  She was so surprised!  "Then how do you speak Chinese!?!?" she asked.  I think that's the only time anyone will mistake me for a Chinese person.

Hey, good lookin', what cha been cooking?

    My cooking class has been a lot of fun.  In early November, we made crabs...and we bought the crabs live!  Their pincers were tied, but they still pinched us several times.  They scampered around the table, knowing their days were numbered...

Nobody likes getting eaten.  This guy was mean.

I can now make steamed crab and stewed crab.  But the experience of watching my teacher rip open a live crab was terrifying, enough to keep me from desiring to make crab any time soon. We made stir fried vegetables and homemade crepe/pancakes to eat with the crabs. I can handle making thin crepes.

    We've made lots of noodles, sweet and sour ribs, great "snow vegetable" soup that tastes so much like Korean mi-yuk gook (which I really, really like).  This past week we made two types of a flat fish called changbian fish.  Delicious!  The first type was cooked in soy sauce, the second type lightly fried with ginger.

Preparing to cook changbian fish.

The biggest development, though, was that we went on our teacher's cooking show!  Only my classmate Kevin did well, though.  That day I was sick, and I actually end up so faint that I didn't finish filming with the other students..........standing for long periods of time+bright lights+skipping lunch+illness does not a good participant make.  I was just too tired to speak well, so I don't sound natural at all.  I watched a little bit of the show and I felt so silly and embarrassed.  Not my best language day.  But I enjoyed the experience, and I liked watching what my teacher works on each week.  Here's a sneak peak below.  I'll update more on doing the show later, and I'll try to put some stills of the show on the blog too.

Lingyin Temple

A post I started in October:

    I have twice visited Lingyin Temple, one of the wealthiest Chan (Zen) Buddhist temples in China.  Lingyin Temple （“Soul's Retreat" monastery) is situated near Peak Flying From Afar (Feilai Feng). Feilai Feng is a small mountain with a few hundred shi ku (石窟), Buddhist stone grotto carvings.  We saw both the stone carvings and the temple.  

    Feilai Feng has over 345 carvings dating from the 10th-14th centuries.  Each significant carving has a plaque with the estimated date of the carving and the subject.  Some grottos date as far back as the 900s.  Most are from the Song and the Yuan dynasties.  Some highlights include carvings of the Maitreya Buddha (the Laughing Buddha), the goddess of mercy Guanyin, and scenes from Journey to the West.  Predictably, many of the carvings were defaced or destroyed during the Cultural Revolution.  Many remained intact, however, especially those that were higher up on the hill or that were of lesser Bodhisattva.  Some of the most important figures that were destroyed have been re－carved, but the plaques only note when the were originally carved. 

 

Defaced carving of a monk, body mostly intact.

    The temple was originally built around 326 AD by an Indian monk who came to Hangzhou.  Its name means "Monastery of the Soul's Retreat".  It has been rebuilt multiple times--but Zhou Enlai ordered that the temple should be preserved during the Cultural Revolution, so most of the buildings are actually older than that.  Many of the objects and buildings are old, but the monastery continues to add on and decorate.  They'd just painted a lot of statues in gold when we came.

    At the front of the temple is the hall of the heavenly gods.  These are the four guardians.  They are HUGE--bigger than any other guardians that I have seen. Each one represents an associated direction (north, south, east, west).  The guards keep harmony in the world:  two are happy and kind, and two look fierce. 

 

Guardian of the West, Virupaksa, who can summon rain (he holds a snake in his hand)

Behind the Hall of the Guardians is the main hall of the temple.  The main hall is over 110 feet tall, and it houses a 65 foot wooden Buddha.  It is China's largest sitting wooden statue of Buddha (according to guide materials). Behind the Buddha is a wall with 156 figures.  It features a large Guanyin, 18 Arhats, Guardian of the Earth Ksitigarbha, and two carvings of Sakyamuni.  The wall is crawling with these carved wooden figures, but the main hall is the most restrictive about taking pictures (so I don't have photos).  Besides these buildings, the temple has several stone pillars, living quarters for the monks, and even a vegetarian restaurant!

The path to the main hall

    Visiting the temple allows you to understand how crowded China can be.  Even when I went for the first time, on a weekday, the temple was crowded with tourists and pilgrims.  When I went a second time, on a Saturday, it was extremely crowded.  Yet the bustling crowd adds to the temple's atmosphere.  It makes the temple feel alive.  Crowds were burning incense, worshipping in front of every hall.  Some people even burned incense in front of the stone carvings.  When I returned on a Saturday, the monks were chanting because someone had hired them to perform a funeral service.  Lingyin temple is an old and very active temple.  When our teacher brought us, she told us that so many people want to be monks that the requirements are now very high--the temple can afford to be picky about who enters as a monk. 

 

This stone has been rubbed by passerby so many times, it's been smoothed down.  The surface feels like marble.

    It is a little harder to get to than other sights in Hangzhou, but I recommend it. 

Architecture

    Last week in our Hangzhou studies class, we studied architecture.  We learned about Buddhist architecture, garden-home architecture (yuanlin, 园林） and traditional homes.  Having already toured Lingyin temple (the major Buddhist temple in Hangzhou), we went to the mansion of Hu Xueyan to see a traditional house that also has a yuanlin garden in it.  According to my handy Hangzhou guidebook and my Chinese-language class materials, it was built in 1872 with 100,000 taels of silver.  Its owner, Hu Xueyan (1823-1885) owned a traditional medicene shop.  It is one of the best-preserved late Qing buildings in the city.  My teacher said that the building was abandoned for most of the 20th century and it became dilapidated.  It was recently refinished but most of the building materials, the layout, and the artwork are original.  Furniture=mixed.
    The house has really high walls, which 1) protected houses from fire and from spreading fires and 2) were a sign that you'd made bank back in the day.  The walls are white stone brick, and the roof tiles are gray in the Huizhou style.  In addition to the living quarters, the house has a private garden designed to imitate nature.  It includes huge stone "mountains" and not one but FOUR tiny caves.

Mr. Hu's private garden.  It is designed to mix natural elements (rocks, trees, water) with manmade elements, creating a design that harmonizes the two.

This cobblestone design is in the shape of old Chinese money.  Since Hu Xueyan was a merchent, he decorated many things in the shape of money.  This was supposed to help bring him more luck and riches.

While building his house, Mr. Hu used both goods and ideas from the West.  He bought 2 huge mirrors from England, a crystal chandelier from France, and plated some of his Chinese-style wooden windows with colored glass (in a Chinese imitation of stained-glass windows).

    The Hu Xueyan villa was worth seeing.  It's a neat Qing residence in central Hangzhou.  I only wish that reproductions and replacements were more clearly distinguished.

Trip to Xinjiang Part 4: To the border (well, almost)

    We headed to Tashkurgan the next morning.  We hopped into an 11 person van with a driver, then we were on our way.  We left at 9:00 AM--and the sun was just starting to come up!  On the way we picked up fresh naan bread and fruit.  It was the best I had the whole trip.  The scenery was gorgeous--we weaved our way through valleys, with snowcapped mountains on either side of us.  We stopped at Lake Karakul and ate lunch.  The lake reflected the sunlight, and as the sun rose higher the water changed from silver-grey to blue to emerald green.  The lake is surrounded by tall mountains and rocky sand dunes. 
    The road to Tashkurgan is the reason people come to the town.  The winding road passes larg flats and tall snow-peaked mountains.  Here, the Pamir mountains rise up to 8000 meters.  We made our way along the road, stopping occasionally to take pictures.

     About an hour past Lake Karakul, we entered the Tashkurgan Tajik Autonomous County.  There, Tajik people are the majority.  Tashkurgan has a large eagle monument dedicated to the Tajik people.  Many of the women wore Tajik headdress, which is a saucer-shaped hat covered by a veil.  All the stores in the bazaar sold colorful fabrics and scarves...bright colors and sequins were the fashion.  Although women dress modestly (showing little skin), they eye-catching sequins and rainbow colors still show how women care about style.  Most of the men wear big fur hats and military jackets.  Our Chinese friend told us most of the non-Tajik people in Tashkurgan are either military personnel or their families.

Main street in Tashkurgan

    We went to the Stone City, which is mostly a pile of stones and little information.  The scenery was impressive, however, and the gate tickets were only 8 kuai (a little over a dollar).  We wandered around on the top of the ruins, and nobody came to bother us.  After seeing the stone city, we ate at a noodle stand.  It's harder to eat with chopsticks when you've got gloves on.   After that we walked around the small town, ending up at a small grocery store.  All the foods were Uighur or Turkish!  I could read the Chinese nutrition labels, and most of the foods were Turkish imports.  A lot of signs were only written in the Arabic script--much fewer Chinese characters here than in Urumqi or even Kashgar.  It was hard to tell whether the signs were written Uighur or Tajik.  It was even harder to talk to most people, as they did not speak much Mandarin unless they were Han. 

Tashkurgan.  It was cold.

    We tried to go to the border, but this time foreigners weren't allowed to go.  We actually needed a permit to go to the Tajik Autonomous Region (which we didn't have).  We had called a regular permit office and they said foreigners didn't need the pass, only Chinese people did; apparently we should have called a different police station and they would have known.  We were able to make it to the region since we all had visas (and our Chinese friends did get the passes).  At the second checkpoint, closer to the border, we were supposed to get another permit.  At that point we were turned away.  Our driver negotiated for over an hour, but in the end it was a no-go.  So we were close, but not quite all the way to the border with Pakistan.

    Instead of heading to the border, we wandered around the hotel and talked with the hotel workers.  We played with a worker's kid and tried to stay warm.  Our hotel "had heat", but in reality you had to actually press yourself against the radiator to feel warmth.  That night I slept with long underwear, two pairs of socks, fleece pants, and a fleece jacket on, inside of my sleeping bag, underneath the hotel blanket.  Count the layers. 

 

Our hotel, with our little friend playing in the door.  The Hilton it was not, but hey, it was only $5.80/person.

    The next day we headed back to Kashgar.  We decided to stay in the same hostel.  We ate baozi and went to the Ida Kah mosque.  We had to hurry through because another round of prayers started in 15 minutes.  The mosque didn't seem big (even though it can fit lots of people), and the inside wasn't as decorative as the Aba Khoja mosque was. 

    We toured the oldest section of the old town.  Our ticket came with a guide, which we needed.  The old town's streets are narrow and twisted!  We saw old mud-brick houses that have been around for hundreds of years.  Children played in the streets and waved to us.  They wanted their photograph taken and would make motions like they were snapping pictures.  I would take their picture and let them see it--they loved seeing what their own pictures looked like.  I was struck by the difference between the little children, who where so outgoing and curious, and the adults, who tended to keep away and prefer not to be watched.  The language barrier was significant.  In Kashgar and Tashkurgan, we had trouble communicating with most of the people we dealt with except tour guides.  The children in this picture couldn't understand any Mandarin except Ni Hao and Zai Jian, hello and goodbye (which they yelled out over and over).

 

Little friends

All in all I spent the following on my 9 day trip: 

• Transportation [plane tickets, bus tickets, hired cars]:  3838 kuai (~$561.56)
• Lodging:  265 kuai (~$39.77)
• Food:  230.4 kuai (~$33.71)
• Other [gate tickets, misc.]: 313 kuai (~$45.80)

Take that, Europe!  The bulk of my expenses were plane tickets (round trip to Xinjiang from Hangzhou, plus one-way from Kashgar to Urumqi).

    I'm glad I made the trip to Xinjiang.  I have heard about it for so long, I wanted to see it with my own eyes.  It is a part of China, but it a completely different place from the China that I am familiar with.  People were friendly, but Mandarin (and English) didn't get us very far in the west.  I saw snow-capped mountains and sandy desert, mosques and CCP government buildings.  Seeing the huge stretches of land made me realize the challeges of developing the Xinjiang region.  The area is probably rich in natural resources, but a lot of those have not been developed yet.  I saw both oil rigs and wind farms while I was there.  The air in Urumqi was clogged with smog from the industries in the city, but farther west there were miles and miles of barren land.  Riding the train to Kashgar, I could spot the occasional settlement but they were mostly abandoned buildings.  Sometimes we passed construction crews building crude roads near the train tracks.  They usually looked like roads to nowhere.  The province is huge, but still largely underdeveloped.  More Han Chinese are moving west, but in many areas Uighurs still lack many economic opportunities.  Each place we went had a "new" part of town and an "old" part.  The "new" part had lots of Chinese, you could spot Han Chinese easily, and all the facilities were nicer and newer.  The "old" part was mostly older buildings and minority peoples.  In many of the older (and non-Han) neighborhoods I saw multi-lingual slogans painted on the walls.  They promoted many programs, from "Implement the new county birth planning policy" to "improve the position of girls in our society" to "economic development is good for the community!".  Fair economic development is a major challenge in the region.

While I was writing this, I saw that the New York Times wrote an article on Xinjiang: 

The Dead Tell a Tale China Doesn’t Care to Listen To. I did not get to see the mummies they are speaking of but I did see other mummies at Astana, also well preserved. 

Xinjiang Trip part 3: Finally in Kashgar

    We decided to take the 24 hour train ride to Kashgar in order to see the scenery.  Soft sleeper berths cost as much as our plane tickets back to Urumqi, so we settled on hard sleepers ($46).  We moved from snowy mountains outside Urumqi, through low, hilly deserts near Kashgar.  The most beautiful part of the ride was definitely the beginning.
    We almost didn't make the train.  Our train left at 11:21, but no stores opened in Urumqi until 10:00 AM.  We had to get food for the trip, so we had to wait until 10 to dash in and buy food.  We shopped quickly and ran to get taxis, but we still arrived at the train station at 11:10!  We sped through luggage inspection, ran up to the 3rd floor, and made it onto the train with less than 4 minutes to spare!  As soon as we found our berths, the train took off.
    We slept, ate, and talked on the train.  We also endured public service announcements during the day.  "Friends, this morning program is on the importance of breakfast.  Not eating breakfast is detrimental to your health.  It's best to eat breakfast within 30 minutes of waking up......."  The constant PSAs made me almost wish I didn't understand Chinese; I was unable to tune out anything...
    We arrived in Kashgar around 11 AM the next day.  As soon as we stepped off the train, I could tell it would be very different from other Chinese cities.  I saw that all the women were veiled, at least covering their hair.  Arabic script (the Uighur language is writte in Arabic script) was much more prominant than it was in Urumqi.  We called our hostel, the Kashgar Old City Hostel, and they came to pick us up.  We only heard of them after we picked up their card at our Urumqi hostel--and I'm glad we picked them, because our hostel was great!  It's in an older part of Kashgar, on a street filled with Uighur stores and restaurants.  The hostel itself is an old residence.  Tall painted doors open up to large, wide rooms.  The rooms didn't have heaters...but we just kept our long underwear on and slept under the thick blankets provided for us.  The owner was so helpful--she helped us plan our trip to the border.

Our hostel, in the old part of town.

    We explored Kashgar after we checked in.  We were close to the Id Kah mosque, one of the largest mosques in Xinjiang.  It sticks out because of its candy-colored exterior.  It was closed for midday prayers, so we headed to the Aba Khoja Mausoleum (香妃墓 in Chinese) on the edge of town. The mausoleum was built in the 17th century.  It houses the tombs of one of Kashgar's most famous leaders.  Among Han Chinese, the tomb is famous for supposedly being the resting place of the Qianlong emperor's concubine Xiang Fei. The building was breathtaking.  It is covered in a pastiche of hundreds of mismatched tiles.  It was a clear day, and the colors of the tiles gleamed in sunlight.  The whole complex (the mausoleum and the mosque beside it) was slightly run down, but it gave the tomb an authentic feel rather than a touristy one (see:  Turpan). 

The Aba Khoa Mausoleum

We wandered around the complex, listening to the sound of hundreds of crows chirping in the rafters.  Only one older man was praying in the mosque.  A guide said that people really only come on Fridays, especially during holidays.  I was intrigued by the pillars that held up the mosque, as each was carved with a different set of flowers:

    Walking around the town, I was struck by how different Kashgar is from the Chinese cities that I am used to.  There are small mosques dotted all over the city (there are Muslims around China, but I don't think I have seen a mosque outside of Xinjiang).  The people themselves look different from Han Chinese.  I even saw a girl with light brown hair...she looked a little bit like me!  I only saw two or three other white people while we were in Kashgar, although part of that was due to our timing (the off season).  The street life in Kashgar was bustling.  In the old town, where we were, each street has a different specialty.  Shops selling metal tools, fruit, instruments, carved furniture, and all kinds of Turkish clothing were grouped together.  Sellers hawked goods from donkey carts in the street as cars and mopeds squeaked by.  I couldn't resist picking up fruit and nut candies when we passed candy carts. 

Candy-colored minaret of the Id Kah mosque

Street scene outside our hostel

    At the end of the day, we found a local restaurant and ate a simple meal.  The next day we planned to go to the border.

Trip to Xinjiang, part 2: Touristy Turpan

    We took a bus to Turpan (42 yuan for morning shifts; 32 for afternoon) the next morning.  On the way we saw snow-peaked mountains and huge wind farms.  Turpan is located in a basin that's the lowest area in China, and also one of the hottest, but when we arrived it was already cool.  The area is mixed Han Chinese and local Uighurs, and the bus company compromised by offering a Chinese kung fu movie broken up by interludes of Uighur music videoes. 
    We arrived in Turpan and a local boss instantly offered us a car ride to see the local sights.  We were tired but negotiated anyway and got to a price we didn't mind.  We each paid about $10 for a minibus, a drive, and 2 days of sightseeing.  After eating a quick luch of Xinjiang noodles, we embarked on our first full day of traveling.
    Turpan is still a sleepy town, but it has revved up its tourism sector.  All in all it has 15 "sights" and an elaborate gate ticket system.  Our guide told us which ones were really old and which ones weren't worth seeing.  We decided to go see the Emin minaret, a karez, the Grape Valley, the Jiaohe ruins, the Flaming Mountains, the Astana Graves, the Gaocheng ruins, Turoq valley, and the Bezeklik caves.
    First was the Emin minaret （苏功塔）, the tallest minaret in China.  It was finished in 1778.  The minaret itself cannot be climbed anymore, but the mosque is still in use.  I was struck by the combination of smooth mud walls and intricate geometric designs used to decorate the mosque.

The whole building

Closeup of the minaret

    After seeing the minaret, we went to see a real karez (坎儿井).  The karez are an engineering marvel that brought water to arid areas of the Western desert....but the karez in Turpan is touristy and silly.
    So after a quick glance at the karez, we headed to the Grape Valley (葡萄沟).  It costs 40 yuan ($5.80) to go in and our tour guide said it was only a few grape plants right now, so he closed our darkly tinted van windows and blew through the checkpoint where we were supposed to buy tickets.  Inside was a valley of grape-producing villages.  We stopped short of the second checkpoint and got out to buy raisins.  I had no idea there were so many types of raisins!  Each stand had a rainbow of colors and many different sizes, from tiny grapes meant to be soaked in water to plum-sized grape raisins.  The vendors let us try most of them, and we bought what we liked.  Although the main harvesting season for grapes had passed, the raisins were good and there were still lots of grapes left on the branches. 
    The last stop of the day was Jiaohe, the ruins of an ancient city.  It had its heyday from 400 AD-1300, when it was abandoned.  We arrived when the sun was setting, and the ruins were eerily beautiful.  All that's left are crumbling walls.  We roamed around until it was dark, watching the sun set below the mountains.

    That night we wandered around Turpan and ate kabobs at the night market.  The next day we loaded up at 8:30 to see the other sights.  First we went to see the Flaming Mountains, a set of mountains that supposedly looks like flames in the middle of the day. It wasn't a sunny day, and the flaming mountains were more like the muddled-misty mountains.  It was funny--we were suppoed to pay to go to the "Flaming Mountains Scenic Spot"--but you could obviously see the mountains from outside the gate!  We were underwhelmed....and didn't pay 40 yuan to go in, either.
    The second site was the Astana graves (阿斯塔那古墓区), an interesting little place with new, tacky buildings built on top of the old graves.  We had trouble with the gatekeepers, who didn't want to give any of us exchange students (留学生) the student discount, even though we have student IDs and are considered full-time Chinese students.  Quote of the day:  "this isn't a money problem, it's a respect problem!".  After a call to the Turpan Tourist Complaint Hotline and calls to two of the sites that had already given us the discount, they gave it to us.  We hestitantly forked over the money and went in.  The new buildings were trashy, but the sight did have several well preserved mummies and I enjoyed seeing the delicate tomb paintings that were open to the public (light sensitive, so no pictures).
    Next we headed to the Gaocheng ruins （高唱古城).  The city is like Jiaohe, but was abandoned later.  It was built in the 1st century and abndoned during the Ming dynasty.  It was so big that we rode a donkey cart all the way to the back, and then walked around on our own.  Accompanying us were three little boys, the sons of the donkey cart drivers.  They ran and clambered over the ruins, following us as we walked along the path.  The highlight of Gaocheng was the city's Buddhist temple in the middle of town. 

Oh, rules, schmoolz...go ahead and play, kids.

    The third stop was a town called Tuyoq （吐峪沟）.  Lonely Planet mentioned it, and our guide said we would really like it.  Its main attraction is seeing the traditional village life.  The village also has a grotto with Buddhist carvings and paintings, but it was closed due to "safety problems".  We wandered the narrow streets, making it all the way back to big sandstone hills in the back of town.  We clambered around the hills and walked over to the grottoes without going in.  I enjoyed Tuyoq a lot.  On the hill, we could look down at the whole town and the grottoes carved into the hillside.  We paid to enter, but there weren't touristy attractions inside or vendors trying to sell us trinkets--just people living life as they have for several hundred years now.

Tuyoq

    The last stop was the Bezeklik caves (柏孜克里克千佛洞).  The caves are mostly empty and closed, as many of the paintings were taken by Westerners in the early 20th century.  I enjoyed the scenery anyway.  The valley was beautiful, and the few paintings left were a little mysterious.  On the roof of each grotto were hundreds of identical Buddhas looking down.  I wish I could have seen the caves as they were originally.  Unfortunately, most of the removed paintings and frescoes were destroyed when the Allies bombed Germany in the 1940s.
    We were so tired after two days of traveling that we made our way to the bazaar at 4 and ate a late lunch.  Then we headed back by bus to Urumqi (32 yuan, a discount of 10 yuan after 2:00 PM).  On the bus, once again, was a mix of a Thai kung-fu movie dubbed in Mandarin and Uighur pop songs.  The Uighur songs were particularly odd because they were Uighur language songs mixed with random international TV shows and movies as the video.  I recognized the Korean drama Winter Sonata and two Indian movies starring Shah Rukh Khan in particular. 

The Trek to Xinjiang, part 1: Urumqi

    For fall vacation, I wanted to head somewhere West.  I've been to China 3 times, and stayed on the East Coast most of the time.  I wanted to see something different.  I originally planned to go to Lanzhou, the Labrang Monastery, and the Mogao Caves.  However, I found out that Labrang is still closed to tourists after the pre-Olympic rioting in Tibet (and Tibetan areas, of which Labrang is one).  So I decided to head to Xinjiang.
    The Chinese assistant to the resident director was the first to sign on.  We planned out where we wanted to go, and found a few other American roommates and one Chinese roommate who wanted to go.  After the first week of October is the end of Xinjiang's tourist season, so we didn't expect to see many other tourists.  We settled on the following trip:

• Fly to Urumqi
• See Turpan
• Take the train from Urumqi to Kashgar
• Get as close to the border as possible
• Fly from Kashgar to Urumqi, return to Hangzhou

Here was our route (note the surrounding countries):

  In the end, we made it almost all the way to the border.  However, the border remains closed to most foreigners (including us) because Japanese tourists pinpointed the border on the internet this summer. After almost two hours of negotiating with the local military and police, it was decided that foreigners were still not allowed to go to the border, including us.  But we were close.......

    We flew from Hangzhou to Urumqi, a flight that took 5 hours total.  Once we landed in Urumqi, it was fairly late.  We had a little trouble finding the White Birches Youth Hostel because the sign was small and it was really dark.  But once we got there, we decided to wake up early and pick up bus tickets to Turpan and train tickets to Kashgar.  We were up at 7:30, only to find out it's dark until about 8:30-8:45.  Urumqi is officially on Beijing time, but it is so far from Beijing that the sun lags behind and doesn't rise and set until late.  In the early morning light we bought train tickets (350 kuai, more than half of a plane ticket to Kashgar) and bus tickets to Turpan.

 

It's past 9:30 in this picture, taken near the city government and People's Square in Urumqi.