Hmm, where to start? I should probably start with telling you about the people I know here, as most of what I spend my time doing is with them. Firstly are my flatmates, obviously. Liam and Catherine. I didn’t really know Catherine at all before we got here, but she’s really nice and funny so we all get on well and have a very happy flat together. Rachel is obviously not living with us, but she is the other University of Newcastle connection. I have mentioned Tobin and Tracey, the Scottish couple, who are studying Chinese. There was also an American couple who live two floors above us in the apartment complex, Eric and Michele, but sadly Michele was only here temporarily so has returned to the States. Eric’s still here studying Uyghur language. There’s another American called Paul learning Uyghur. He was originally learning Chinese at our university but has now moved to the Agriculture University so he can concentrate on just Uyghur, as his Chinese is already pretty good. Nolan from California is an English language teacher at our university. There’s also Jonny, an English teacher from New Zealand, who I believe teaches at the Agriculture University. This is our little group of Westerners. Added to this group there’s various Chinese, Uyghur, Mongolian and other American people that we meet from week to week. For a while, there was Ivan, a Kazakh who was acting as Eric’s German tutor, plus his girlfriend Angelikà. They’ve pretty much disappeared now – we think they’ve gone back to Kazakhstan. Not the widest circle of friends, but there’s few opportunities here to meet genuine friends (as opposed to the Chinese type of friend: they come up to you and say “let’s be friends!” just because you’re white. And from then on, you’re expected to teach them English. So we have come to look on people we meet very suspiciously these days, as we expect them to just be looking to use us for English practice. Catherine is very good at picking out genuine friends from the bunch and has therefore found herself lots more friends than me and Liam. Guess maybe we’re just too cynical eh.).
So what do we all do together? Eating out is a favourite. Food here is very cheap and so we can afford to eat out pretty much whenever we fancy. More recently we’ve come to realise we could perhaps do with spending a little less on food, as it seems to be eating up our kuai pretty fast, but in the first couple of months we used to eat out for lunch with Tracey and Tobin after most of our morning classes. Occasionally bigger groups of us would go out for dinner too. We also liked a coffee bar called Eversun. It serves quite nice food, which it claims is Western. It’s not especially Western really but it comes as close as we’re likely to get! It’s very expensive and to be honest it’s not my sort of thing, but back then we’d go there from time to time.
Another favourite is going out on the night – of course! Our most frequented bar is fubar, a bar run by an Irish guy, a Japanese guy, and a Kiwi. The crowd there are almost always Westerners – fubar get into all the travel guides and so there is a constant flow of travellers through, plus the constant regulars. This is the place we went, and still go to, to socialise and get a bit of Western joy. I also tried shisha here for the first time – apple flavour, very nummy but also made my breathing extremely strained, so I guess I’ll be keeping my pathetically asthmatic self away from that from now on. Before we went travelling in Golden Week, we’d only found one club, which is a Uyghur club. It’s brilliant. We used to go a lot more regularly; in fact we haven’t been for weeks and weeks now. You have to be quite willing to just let yourself go and get into the Uyghur dancing, which is danced in a very particular way. The men basically stick their arms out in front of them in a sort of frame, and then bounce their shoulders whilst spinning around or rocking backwards and forwards. The women get leeway for a bit more creativity: spinning as well, but also lots of swirly hand gestures and head movements. The club is not like any Western club I’ve ever been to – there are armed security guards dotted around the dance floor and acting as doormen, and there are live performances. After every song, the dancefloor is cleared, and then the next song begins and everyone goes back on again! As this defies all common logic, we decided to stay on the dancefloor and see if we could change the run of things, but we summarily removed by a guard with a gun.
We were warned by Tracey, who’d lived in other parts of China before, that people would approach us for English practice, but until the day she told us this, nobody had ever come up to us. But on that very day, lo and behold! We got our first request! The Chinese can be very forward about this, and like I said, just march up and say “let’s be friends! Give me your phone number.” We’ve learnt now how to turn people down but when it first happened we just made loads of excuses about having just got there and so not having a phone. Not that that stopped them; they asked for our address instead.
Before Golden Week, we’d only been in Urumqi for a month and were still settling into the scheme of things. There’s a lot to do and see in Urumqi but actually at this point we’d experienced very little of it. We stuck to the places we knew and the people we’d already met and let our friends discover all the new places! Not very pioneering, but there you go. There’s not much else I can say then. I suppose one interesting thing happened to us, and that was being invited to the National Day Reception for Foreign Experts.
I say we were invited, but that was not, in fact, the case. Good old Anniwar told Rachel that there was a convention and banquet that we were all invited to, and could she tell us to turn up on campus at a certain time so they could bus us to the posh hotel where it was to be held. Smart dress needed as well. On the day, Catherine decided not to go, but Liam and I gamely put on the smartest clothes we had in China (me: dark jeans, fitted black top (with a some-time broken zip). Liam: jeans, T-shirt) and went over to campus, where we discovered Paul and Nolan were also coming, and dressed in suits and ties. Uh-oh. I’m not sure if it was then or later that we noticed our stupid Chinese washing machine had put a hole in Liam’s top. Oops. Rachel turned up with a lovely colourful outfit and bright green hair, so we felt less out of place then. Finally Anniwar turned up, took one look at us, and called Rachel over to have a private word. She came back and said: “guys, I’m so sorry, he’s saying you weren’t invited, that it was just me. But I swear he told me to tell you to turn up!” She told him that he had told her this, and now she had caused her classmates to turn up but with nowhere to go! To which he responded: “the government has cut them off. Make excuses to them.” To this day, we’re not entirely sure what that means.
As there were so many people, two mini-buses were needed and as Paul was waiting for his landlady to turn up, he and Rachel waited behind. She worked in the office with Anniwar and her husband was some kind of official and so she had wangled him an invite. We were still hanging around chatting when she arrived; deciding what to do with our evening now that the government had so meanly cut us off, and she told us to come anyway. So we did.
Paul, Liam and I were stuck in a table at the back, but we still got to see all the presentations, which were pretty dull. Then we enjoyed a huge feast of traditional Chinese food. Since coming to Urumqi my tolerance to spice has grown considerably, so when Paul dared me to eat a tiny weeny green chilli, it seemed like a fun thing to do. Cue lack of breathing and feeling of faintness. As my vision started to blur I swore I’d never do that again.
What was most exciting about the convention (to us, anyway) was the HUGE number of foreigners there. I have never seen so many white people in one room in my life! Well, in China, anyway. And all dressed so smartly, too. Actually, we ran into Phil (from Nuneaton!!!), Jonny the Kiwi’s friend, who we’d met a week or two back, and he was wearing an old blue Adidas tracksuit so we felt much better about our clothes. Posed for lots of photos with Anniwar and various important people – why they were actually important was lost on me, but apparently they were. I didn’t realise there were so many foreigners in Xinjiang, and I still don’t know where they’re all hiding.
So that was the last big event before we went off on our travels. As I said, by this point we’d only been in Urumqi for less than a month, so not so much to say about life as it was back then!
This is a group shot of us eating out at a Sichuan restaurant in early September. Standing l-r: Liam, Me, Nolan. Sitting, l-r: Tobin, Catherine, Eric, Michele, Tracey
Another group shot, out eating traditional Uyghur food as a big group for the first time, l-r: Paul, Tracey, Tobin, Liam, Rachel, Jonny
One of the official photo thingies we had to pose for. I don't know who everyone is, but far left standing back row is Paul, then a Korean girl who I believe goes to our university, green hair is Rachel, next to Rachel is Liam, then a Japanese man, then me, then Nolan, then an American girl, then two Xinjiang Shifan Daxue staff members. Then the two on the right seated are two random Americans (the man may actually be British, I'm not sure), to the left of them are two more staff members, and then finally on the far left may I introduce... Anniwar.
1 comment:
It's extreeemely cool that you can now say you were cut off by the government! How DID those desserts taste anyway?!
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