Back on the crest of the wave

I got an email from my friend Chris (hi Chris :) this morning commenting on the roller coaster of "I love this place" and "this place is frustrating" blog entries of the last few days.  He nailed that one.  It is totally an up and down experience - often even within the same day.  Today was a lot better in general though.  I did spend about 3 hours in various banks while Shaoyuan tried to figure out the best way to get access to the money he needs, so that kind of sucked.  Not sure why I had to hang around for that.  But the rest of the afternoon and evening I spent wandering the city with my new student friend and another female friend of his.  Both speak excellent english, and Jacob's friend Maripet is actually an english teacher.  We also discovered that each of us has a birthday coming up within about 10 days of each other, so when I return to Urumqi I think we're going to get together again for a belated birthday celebration for all of us.  That will be fun.  Maripet is awesome.  She's super nice and easy to talk to, and we all three had a great time talking and wandering for about 4 hours.  They took me back to the big international bazaar which is really more of a tourist market.  Every stall is a repeating element of another - jeweled boxes and mirrors, Ughyur knives, scarves, spices, nuts, raisins, enamel coated vases, traditional instruments, petrified wood chunks, wood sculptures, fur hats, etc, etc.  

We walked down one side street where there are a bunch of street vendors who are "medicine men".  Apparently they can touch your wrist, feel your pulse, diagnose your illness, and prescribe some wretched herb or dried animal bit tea that will cure what ails you.  I'm a touch skeptical.  But it was really cool seeing their wares.  One guy had two small buckets of scorpions.  I couldn't get an answer on what those are supposed to treat.  I'm not sure if you're supposed to eat them or let them sting you, but I can't see that either is pleasant.  Then there were dried snakes and flattened lizards, bits of horns and various unidentifiable roots and plant parts.  There are Chinese medicine stores all over the place here, but they all have a much more formal and aesthetic appearance - more like you're visiting a museum with specimens in jars.  This felt more like going around the corner to your neighborhood dude who's gonna give you a bit of snake to chew on.

I won't be foolish and comment on politics while in China, but there is a former department store that is now a bunch of rundown stalls.  As we walked past, my friends whispered that it used to belong to a Ughyur woman.  Google search Rebiya Kadeer to see her story.  There is an excellent recent article from the Sydney Morning Herald.

Maripet is Ughyur as well, but she looks very different from most of the other Ughyurs here.  She has long dark auburn hair that is very curly, fair skin, and pale brown eyes.  I asked if she has any western heritage, and they both laughed.  She gets asked that all of the time, but to the best of her knowledge all of her ancestry is Ughyur.  The Ughyurs have been here in some form or another for over 1300 years.  It was really interesting walking around with them, because they both switched flawlessly between Ughyur language talking to each other and some of the shop keepers, Chinese talking to other shop keepers, and then English when speaking with me. My brain would fry if I even knew three languages to try to switch between.  

It was really hot today, but I've been assured that it gets much much hotter.  As high as 45 degrees C.  I can't even fathom that temperature in Fahrenheit, so I had to look it up. It's about 113 F.  That's the hottest I've experienced in my life, so I'm not anticipating this being much fun.  Today we sought refuge under a tent and had slices of watermelon and fresh home made ice cream.  That rocked pretty solidly. I think this has been a pretty spectacular end to my first stay in Urumqi, and it kept me from going on a homicidal rampage which would be certainly punished by death.  I already know that's not the way I'm destined to go.  Give me enough time in China, and my demise will come either under the wheels of or inside of a Chinese taxi cab.  The drivers here are mad and the only thing worse than the drivers are the folks on foot.  People step off the curb and cross in the middle of traffic, against the crosswalk sign (yes, they do exist!) and almost get hit left and right.  Because the people walk out so frequently, the drivers are very assertive and stop for no one.  Add onto that the fact that less than 50% of seatbelts seem to work in this place, and you're asking for disaster.  I try not to think about it too much though.  It's otherwise quite paralyzing.

By the way, I learned a cool new fact for all you science junkies from Jimmy Hu this morning.  Did you know that Tom Cruise very likely suffers from a mild form of holoprosencephaly?  He's got a single fused front incisor! Google search it - it's true! I personally think he might suffer minor brain damage as a result, and maybe that's why he's a little batty.  This fun fact brought to you by our favorite zany kiwi grad student :)