After getting back to Kashgar, we felt pretty done with Xinjiang, so we took a 24 hour bus ride from Kashgar to Urumqi. We got in to Urumqi pretty late at night, went back to the White Birch Youth Hostel and had some "spiiiicy chicken" at a nearby restaurant. The next day, we looked at our options for transportation to Chengdu. The train ride was about 20 hours and they only had standing tickets. A same-day plane ticket was rather expensive, so we bought a ticket for two days later and miraculously managed to fly standby that same day! We didn't know how to say "standby" in Chinese (and actually were a little hazy on the details, as neither of us had flown standby in the U.S.), but we were able to communicate what we meant,
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