9/29/2006 China Day 4: Tian Chi --> Urumqi, Xinjiang - Uh Oh, This Is Not Good ...

I may never (want to) work again like Barzel! That's what I thought this morning as I was brushing my teeth gazing at Tian Chi lake seated upon a rock.

Woke up at 3 AM ready to go. Where's the sun?! Oh, it's only 3 AM and it's damn cold! Went back to sleep until 6 AM, and then 7 AM. Got up, brushed my teeth, and packed up my sleeping gear except for my sleeping bag, which I laid out to dry in the cold air.

On the way back from rinsing off my hands in the lake, I met Hyo Dros, a Dutch man on 12-month sabatical in Asia. He came with the Dutch tour group, but he's continuing on without them as they return today. He doesn't speak any Chinese. He's going to Dunhuang first and then headed to Tibet. I thought we might meet up there, since I'm headed there after visiting Kanas Lake and Kashgar.

For breakfast, we had some noodles. The English and I played a round of cards, and then they packed up to leave. (I had already packed.) We left Rashid's place around 11:30 AM and headed down the mountain.

At the welcome center atop the mountain, Brian and I parted ways with the 3 English guys because they wanted to kill some time there because their prepaid bus didn't leave until 4:30 PM. Brian needed to get back to Urumqi as early as possible to catch a bus to Turpan. I was happy to get back to Urumqi to arrange travel to Kanas Lake. I told the English I would see them at their hostel in Urumqi because it was cheaper (30 RMB) than my last hotel (160 RMB) and good enough.

On the hike down, Brian pointed out a woman that was wearing red pumps and having a very difficult time getting down. On the tour bus to Tian Chi, on the trails, and atop the mountain, there was no shortage of Chinese tourists not dressed for hiking - button-down dress shirts, dress slacks, and dress shoes. We descended the mountain uneventfully and arrived right on time to catch the 2 PM municipal bus to Urumqi (20.5 RMB).

In Urumqi, Brian and I parted ways. I helped him catch a taxi to the other city bus station to catch his bus to Turpan. I headed to the hostel.

I checked in at the hostel and an employee there who spoke very good English gave me very detailed instructions on how to do the 3 things I wanted to get done that day:

• Make arrangements to get to Kanas Lake


• Get my 3rd and final rabies vaccination shot


• Buy a water filter

Lonely planet makes it seem difficult to get to Kanas Lake without a tour group, but the guy at the hostel made it seem easy. Catch an overnight bus for 160 RMB, then catch a 4-passenger jeep (50 RMB) to Kanas Lake that leaves when it's full. He also gave me directions to a clinic where he had gotten rabies shots, as well as the card for an outdoor gear shop.

I went to get my rabies shot first because it was around 4:30 PM and the clinic would close earliest. I tried to take the bus (1 RMB), but it was near impossible without either the name of the clinic or the name of the bus stop to ask the driver or a passenger to help me out. So I got off at the wrong stop and took a taxi to the clinic. With the aid of a dictionary, getting a rabies shot (80 RMB) was not that difficult.

Next, I went to the bus station to get my bus ticket to Bu'erjin (160 RMB), the closest town to Kanas Lake. It being the Friday before the autumn national holiday (everyone in the country gets the week off), the lines were pretty long, but they were orderly. It took perhaps 30 minutes, but I was able to purchase a ticket without any problem.

By this time, it was 6:30 PM and although I could have gone to buy a water filter then, I was hungry and I thought my English friends might have arrived back at the hostel by then and be hungry also. Turns out my timing was just right, and I arrived just as they were checking in. Dan needed a shower, so we all took one. Then we headed off to the Wuyi night market to eat.

We went back to the same kebab place that I ate at alone 2 nights before. The restaurant is actually 4-in-1. It has an outdoor kebab place, and indoor noodle soup, fried noodle, and fancy sit-down places. Since none of us could really order food by name, we instead walked around with a server and pointed out things on a picture menu (where available) or things that people were eating. We ended up with a delicioous meal of noodles, Chinese pancakes, kebabs, and beers that we all shared. Total price: 80 RMB = $2.50 per person.

2 interesting things happened over dinner. The first was that a poor Uighur man trying to make a living by selling canteloupe slices got mad at me due to a linguistic barrier. The Uighur have their own language, and some of them, especially some of the older ones, don't speak Chinese very well. So the canteloupe vendor came by our table and let me taste a sample. It was very sweet and flavorful, so I thought I'd order a slice. I asked the vendor how much a slice would cost, and I believe he answered 3 RMB (expensive in retrospect - should be about 1 RMB). However, either he or I misunderstood, and he started cutting up 3 canteloupe slices instead of charging me 3 RMB for 1 slice. When I protested that I only wanted to buy 1 slice, the vendor started to get agitated (presumably because he had already sliced the other 2 pieces) and the Chinese restaurant workers stepped in on my side (I had previously made friends with a couple of them) and tried to diffuse the situation. The fruit vendor was insistent, however, wanting me to buy all 3 slices. The restaurant employees told me to only buy what I wanted. In the end, however, the vendor insisted on 3 pieces, and then 2 pieces for so long, and he even clenched his fist at me and growled in Uighur at me, that the restaurant employees chased him away without me buying anything at all.

Afterwards, I was a little bit worried about the altercation because the canteloupe vendor was still hanging around and his canteloupe knife was pretty long! He was also sulking with a few of his Uighur friends, so instead of 1 angry Uighur with a knife after me, it might have been 4 angry Uighurs with knives after me. The Uighurs, like the Turks, with some common ancestry from Turkistan, Kazakhstan, like their knives. And I had forgotten Zeki's admonitions until now to be careful with Turks and their knives. Luckily in the end, I didn't get stabbed.

Well, the other thing that happened at dinner was that I met a beautiful girl in what seemed to me to be such an unlikely string of occurrences. She was sitting at a table next to ours with 2 guys. I first noticed her beautiful, colorful skirt. Being the new, more outgoing me, I wanted to compliment her on her skirt. I waited a bit for her to turn my way for me to talk to her, but she never did. In the meantime, the 3 English guys noticed my distraction and we started talkinga bout the girl in the pretty skirt.

To my surprise, most or all of them said it would get their goat if a random guy came up and complimented their girlfriend in front of them. They would either want to fight to defend their honor (actually, I'm not sure whose honor would have been offended there) or would just watch the guy with a very wary eye.

I tried to convince them that it was just an innocent compliment, and that it was nice to make other people feel good, but they weren't convinced that I was so innocent :-). I persisted and said if it were me, I would just be happy that someone else thought my significant other loved me enough to want to stay with me. Violence or defensiveness couldn't be the answer because someday someone would say the same thing to her and they wouldn't be there to do anything. I would just be happy that she chose to say with me every day.

To which the English responded that while they didn't necessarily disagree with me, they would still get angry. To which, I threw up my hands in the air and gave up. However, the English were now riled up and they were daring me to go over and talk to the girl. They wanted to see how a Chinese boyfriend would respond. Without their egging, I probably wouldn't have gotten out of my chair to tell the girl that I liked her skirt, but in this case, I said, what the hell.

So I got up, walked 10 steps around out table, and told her. I asked here where she got it, and could I buy on too, and she said Beijing. I asked her if I could take a picture, and she said yes, but not to include her face. A shame, because she had a pretty face that was getting prettier by teh second (It's a well known fact that if a man likes a woman's personality, her outward appearance becomes more beautiful to his eyes.) At this point, not only did she get up for me to take a picture, she actually posed and modelled it.

Afterwards, she invited me to sit down with them, and she introduced me to her 2 friends. We talked a little, and I told them where I was from. After a while, I asked her to write her name down for me so I could write it in my journal, and she did (Tian Fang) - along with her telephone number and email address. At some point in there, we actually took a couple real pictures together including our faces. And I asked her what she was going to do tonight, and she said she was going to the bar.

That's about it, and I went back to my table, happy to have met a sweet girl. Back at our table, the English were mildly impressed. Personally, thinking back on it, it felt to me like a staged performance with accomplices in the audience. Honestly, I just expected to go over to her, compliment her, hopefully watch her smile and say thank you, and then say goodbye. But as each new invitiation to stay a while came (invitation to sit down, take pictures, getting her phone number), I kept thinking, this shouldn't be happening to me, I'm just not that slick.

So Tian Fang and her 2 friends left first. We waved goodbye. My English friends and I finished soon after and decided to go to a bar ourselves. I have no idea what bar Tian Fang went to. We went to a bar the English had been to before - Fubar. I recognized the computer meaning of the name ("foo" and "bar" are the canonical first 2 variable names in programming, like "x" and "y" in algebra); the English told me about the military meaning (Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition) which I didn't know previously; and the bartender told me that the Chinese translation had a very good meanining as well - "Good Luck Bar" or "Happiness Bar".

Apparently Fubar is the only foreign-owned and -run bar in Xinjiang. The bartender's name was Hiro. He was Japanese and spoke very good English and Chinese. He had very good beers and scotches, such as Leffe, Duvel, and Macallan 12. I had a Leffe. I asked how much a shot of Macallan 12 was, and he said that he could only sell it by the bottle because the Chinese didn't know it and weren't inquisitive enough to discover it. Same for the Belgian beers. He was selling the Macallan 12 for $120 U.S. or so.

I played a couple games of pool with the English when I got to thinking, if Tian Fang gave me her phone number without me asking for it, she must have wanted me to use it. And the only time I could really use it was that night, because she told me she was leaving for Kashgar, Xinjiang the next morning for 1 week. And I was leaving that same evening for Kanas Lake.

Since I had no phone (and neither did my English friends), I asked Hiro if I could use the bar's phone to make a phone call. He cheerfully agreed. I dialed Tian Fang's number twice, but could not get through. There was a recorded message from the phone company, but I couldn't understand it. One of the regular bar patrons sitting next to me at the bar took and interest in my escapades and asked if she could help. I showed her the number and she dialed it on her mobile. The recording again came on and said it was a bad number. My new friend thought for a while and then thought that perhaps this was not a local number and she needed to dial 0 first. That worked, and we got through, but Tian Fang didn't pick up. I don't think she had voicemail, because my friend didn't leave a message or ask me if I wanted to leave one. Oh well, I tried.

I spoke some with the girl who helped me call Tian Fang. She's a travel agent who is also learning English on the side. I asked if she was learning English to be able to help foreigners, but she said it was just for her own interest.

I also talked to another Chinese woman who looked very bored and unhappy next to her boyfriend, who was busy on his laptop. I went over and asked her why she was unhappy, but she denied it (could have fooled me). She is a sculpting teacher, and was making some sculptures of the 3 bar owners for the bar. I can't think of where the sculptures would fit in with the bar decor. Turns out she and the travel agent were friends.

About 30 minutes after we called, Tian Fang called back the travel agent on her phone, and the travel agent brought me her phone - so nice of her. I spoke with Tian Fang a few minutes - asked her if the bar she was at was fun; she asked the same of the bar I was at. Neither of us was really crazy about the bar we were at, but she decided to come over to Fubar. That was 10:30 PM.

She arrived at 11 PM with a couple friends. We talked a bit and then decided to head to another bar where some of her friends were hanging out that night. When we got there, I was pretty excited to see an authentic Chinese bar where real Chinese hang out. It turned out to be a special night - one of Xinjiang's best known poets was having a gathering with several other poets and some musicians. So there were many poetry readings and some musical performances. I was even inspired to recite half of Beaudelaire's "La Musique". Unfortunately, I couldn't remember the whole thing at the time (now I do), so the poem ended kind of ubruptly. The audience was still kind enough to clap though.

At some point later in the evening, they took a break from live entertainment and put on a few danceable tunes. A couple started (fast) dancing and I grabbed a female poet that I happened to be talking to at the time, and we started dancing. Soon other women joined the dance floor. Since there weren't many other men on the dance floor, I started dancing with the other women too. The guy from the original couple handed me his girl to dance with too. It felt good to dance with so many girls. I was really tired out after 3 songs though.

Another interesting thing about the Chinese bar was that several tables were eating popcorn. While this is not at all unusual in the United States, it is unusual in many other countries, such as France. They don't eat popcorn at all in France. So it was interesting for me to see that they do eat popcorn in China.

The rest of the evening, I drank alcohol with some of Tian Fang's friends. At some point, she invited me to go with her and 15 of her friends on their vacation to Kashgar in the west of Xinjiang. I immediately thought of Barzel's advice here: "If anyone (local) ever invites you to do anything, drop wahtever you're doing and go with them, because then you'll get to see how the locals really live." So even though I had already bought my bus ticket to Kanas Lake ($20) for the next evening, I happily accepted Tian Fang's invitation.

People started leaving the bar around 2 AM, and I was tired too, so I got up to leave. Tian Fang accompanied me to my hostel even though I protested because her home was in the opposite direction. We made plans to meet at the train station at 11:30 AM the next morning. Went to sleep at 2:30 AM.