Journey to the West

The watchful eye of the Colonel follows you in decently-sized Chinese city. Good thing KFC is Halal (note the Arabic name for "KFC")!

First, sorry about the lack of blogging activity! I guess the history of this blog was to document my travels, and so to there has been very little bloggable activity because, well, I haven't been traveling! The fact that I've been just living and working in the past few months, and my existence here is a pretty mundane one.

I guess the one exception to all this that I have been sort of "transferred" to the Foundation's field office in Xinjiang Province, which is basically as far west in China as you can get. Well, I think "transferred" is too formal a term, as it connotes that I actually have a position at the Foundation when, in fact, I'm just a lowly intern. Basically, they needed someone to go help out, and I figured, "What the hey!" So now I spend most of my days in Ürümqi, the provincial capital and apparently the furthest city inland from the sea. Interesting eh! I guess you can call it my own "Journey to the West"! Hehe, that's a play on the Chinese classic, Journey to the West (西游记)...except without the Monkey King (although - fun fact! - did you know that Journey to the West was originally set in Xinjiang! But I digress...).

Sometimes Ürümqi can be even more polluted than Beijing! Hard to believe! The city is surrounded on three sides by mountains, so the pollution often gets trapped. I wish I could say this was fog, but it's pure pollution.

I live next door to this smokestack.

Anyhoo, Ürümqi is a laid-back kind of place compared to Beijing, and relatively small as a sub-3 million population city. Xinjiang is populated by both Han Chinese and Uyghurs (also Uighurs), and the Uyghur culture is very much different from what one would consider Chinese. Uyghur people are Muslim, and so Halal Xinjiang cuisine rules the roost here (luckily, Xinjiang food is awesome). The Uyghur language is derived from Turkish, and the script is also Arabic. Given the recent unrest in other parts of minority-populated China, it should probably be brought to your attention, dear reader, that Uyghur-Han Chinese relations are (and always have been) quite tense. As a Slate feature recently reported, Xinjiang is kinda like Tibet without the Dalai Lama or the Beastie Boys.

Here are just a few views from my limited walks outside the 2 km distance between my apartment and office!

Right by Ürümqi's famous Big Bazaar. It could be Central Asia for all you knew...

Silk Road = Desert = Camels. Whee.

Xinjiang is probably the only place in China where this sign means something.