Urumqi (Wulumuqi 乌鲁木齐）

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T-bag and his girlfriend met us at the Urumqi train station and helped us get a cab and make our way to our hostel. We ended up staying at the White Birch Hostel, which was nice and clean, good facilities, comfortable beds. I LOVED and continue to love sleeping with sheets! All this summer I slept on a straw mat on top of the sheets and also a smaller straw mat on the pillow. When it stayed in the high 80’s all night (and maybe higher in the house because my host mother had some thing about keeping the windows closed and the shades open during the day like a greenhouse) the straw mat was soooo sticky, when I wanted to move around while sleeping I had to like peel my skin off of it. Anyway, sheets!!! So good! After checking in, the four of us went to the International Bazaar. Xinjiang has many beautiful sunny days and so it is famous for its fruit there grows very big and sweet. We ate cantaloupe, which is called Hamigua (Hami fruit) because Hami is famous for it. They had lots of shops with all kids of dried fruit and also many knife shops. Uyghur men often carry knives. It was funny on a bus we took to see this man take out a big scary looking knife to cut pieces of apple for his little grandson. Then we hiked up to a tower on a hill. Urumqi has two of those towers like in the Lord of the Rings and I forget what they are for. From the top we could get a good view of the city. We also ran into a group of policemen on a fieldtrip. After that, we went to the Xinhua bookstore and bought a Mandarin-Uyghur phrasebook and a map of Xinjiang. Then we went out for kebabs/chuanr串 at this cool outside food street with tons of shaokao places. The character for chuanr looks like two pieces of food on a stick! We each had a glass of Wusu beer. The company was started by Russians, we heard? They were real beers with appreciable alcohol content! Our new friends got very silly and cute and T-bag turned bright red. We also tried a new kind of fruit that had cool baby fruits inside but was otherwise rather tasteless. Then we went out to a club to dance, but we had to leave and get back to the hostel before the party really got started.

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