Pre-Golden Week

In China, holidays from higher education are not quite the same as in Britain. In England at University of Newcastle, terms go like this: Late September/very early October: begin Autumn Term. Late October is half-term/reading week for some lucky few (moi included!) and then we break up for Christmas around 17th December. Back to uni for January 9th-ish (Winter/Spring Term), normally we get a week and then it’s exam period until Semester 2 begins in February. Term breaks up for a month, give or take a day, around Easter (normally March 20th to April 20th) and then we begin the final term – Summer Term. Exams come in June usually, and then we have holiday from mid June until we’re back in September. It’s very organised and follows a pretty strict schedule. China, needless to say, seems a little less organised. Xinjiang Normal University, of course, has no modicum of schedule whatsoever.
Term 1 started in early September, and then Golden Week was upon us at the end of September. Golden Week is effectively half term and is arranged to celebrate Mid-Autumn Festival. Officially there are only three days holiday for the festival, so the university moved the two other weekdays to the weekend (so we had lessons on the weekends instead of the following Thursday and Friday) – that way we got a whole week’s holiday. Mid-Autumn Festival celebrates the ascension of a woman into the moon with her rabbit… a little weird I guess. You traditionally eat mooncakes, which are like sweet pies of varying sizes stuffed with various fillings – some good and some vile.
I’ll cover the other term dates and so on when I get to them chronologically. Let me just say that we rarely know until the week of the holiday/return to classes/exam that anything is going to happen at all. Asking the staff members prior to the occasion in question is futile; they don’t know either. It’s all up to the powers that be. We weren’t entirely sure when we’d actually get off classes so we could go off on our planned Golden Week travels, but a few days before, we finally learned what was going on. It was too late by that point as we had already booked our long-distance train tickets and so we were forced to miss the newly scheduled weekend classes. Shame.
Catherine and I wanted to see some of the rest of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, besides its capital Urumqi where we live, at some point and in mid-September we went into our local bookstore (Xinhua International – there are all different types of Xinhua: educational, foreign language, international, normal and so on. The international is the biggest. Like Waterstones in Brum.) and checked out some maps and guidebooks. Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t long until we were approached by a few people who were very interested in our existence. We chatted with them for a while and they told us some interesting places to go. There were so many places and they were all so far away that it made sense to go on one long journey and travel to them in sequence instead of doing one at a time, and this is when our Golden Week travel plans began to form. However at this stage, there was a very good chance that Catherine was going to go to South Korea to see some friends instead, and so the plan was left in the air for a bit.
There was something else going on at this point which was casting stress and uncertainty over everything, and that was our trying to acquire residence permits. After registering at the university, every student has to take their documents over to the Public Security Bureau to get their passport stamped. This is so that we’re actually allowed to live here… you don’t do this, you get deported. Simple.
Pangpang took us to the Bureau after the fortnight of registration. He was actually ill and so had gone to hospital and been on a drip (more about Chinese healthcare at a later date) so he was pretty out of it. We got to the Bureau and while we were waiting to be seen, they shut early without warning, so though he’d bothered to come out to help us there had been no point after all. Back the next day by ourselves. The Bureau runs a lot like the Chinese banks: you go to a little machine and press a button for the service you need. The machine prints a little ticket with your number and counter number, and then you must wait for your number to be called. It reminds me of the deli counter at the supermarket! The main difference is that the Chinese don’t queue like the British. And fair play to them really; they know that if they don’t get an early number then they’ll be here for hours what with all the delays. People begin waiting up to an hour before the official opening time, and when it gets to about ten minutes before, they start to crowd up by the doors. The moment they open the door, dozens of people shove through them and charge to the single little machine. You’re pulled along with the crowd but good luck trying to press one of the buttons! If you do manage to elbow your way to the front and press the correct button, there’s a very good chance someone else will steal your printed ticket! Putting all our manners and inhibitions aside, we got our tickets.
It was on this day that I had damn bad food poisoning (well we thought it was food poisoning until Liam got it the week after!) and so there I was at the Public Security Bureau practically passed out on the plastic chairs. At our section of the office there weren’t many people that day, so I wasn’t taking up anybody’s seat. People kept coming up to me and telling me to go to hospital. Some horrible Russian man who was in fact just another customer came over and told me to sit up. I was tempted to vomit on his shoes; that’d shut him the hell up. Fortunately on this occasion we were not at the Bureau long. We handed over our documents and passports and then I went home to lie in bed with the bin next to my head; right where I belonged. We were told to come back next week to pick up our passports and so back we went.
On that second occasion, it was pure hell. This time Liam was the ill one, and the Bureau was crowded to breaking point with stressed-out foreign people. Liam went to wait outside where it was calmer and Catherine and I took turns queuing at the various counters. When it got to our number we went up to the correct counter and asked for our passports back. They told us to go to the counter next to it. We queue more. When we reached the front, we are told to fill in a form and go back to the original counter. Off we go, and at that counter we’re told there’s nothing they can do for us and we need to go to the counter down at the other end of the room. Finally we get there and I force my way to the front where I run into LiLi, a friendly Kazakh girl we’d met a couple of times. I waited about 45 minutes at this counter, until suddenly they asked me for money, which I realised we didn’t have enough of (as we weren’t aware we had to pay anything, not having been told, of course). So Liam and I went home and got enough money for the three of us and Catherine stayed at the Bureau to keep an eye on any developments. When we finally got back it looked pretty much like we were never going to get our passports. They had told me that they were in a different room, and so they had to send somebody to look for them and it would take a while. That was why I’d waited for 45 minutes. But these passports never materialised. We proceeded to go to various counters trying to track down our passports, or at the very least a clue as to what was going on/a useful person. Needless to say, none of the three could be found. Eventually we were told to come back the following week. Ah. Slight problem, for a lot of people. The date we were told to come back was just before Golden Week, and practically every foreign student wanted to go travelling. To travel in China, you need your passport; otherwise you can’t stay in any hotels. To travel outside of China, you obviously need your passport to cross the border, but also to book plane tickets you need to give them your passport details, which the average person can’t call to mind voluntarily. So Catherine was in no position to book tickets to South Korea – the flights are very expensive and she can’t get full refunds so if she even managed to book a flight without her passport details, if she hadn’t got it back in time she’d not be able to enter the country. So all her plans were scuppered by the incompetence of the Public Security Bureau.
Catherine had not been 100% decided on going to South Korea anyway, and so the other plan we had was for the three of us to go travelling to all these places we’d learnt about in the bookshop. But we were in a bit of a pickle there too – no passport = no hotel.
So that was the state of play just before we went: one of chaos, as per usual, and us not knowing what to do next. We went to see Anniwar in our desperation and he rang the Bureau for us and discovered that actually, they were lying to us about when we could get our passports – we thought we’d get them just before Golden Week (20th September) but apparently we’d be unlikely to get them until October. After Golden Week. He told us he’d try to use his connections to get them to us faster. The next day, with no sign of any progress, Catherine marched into the International Office and demanded a student card. Student cards were yet another hassle involved in the whole registration process – in fact even now in January there are still lots of students without them. They’d been umming and aahing about them and said we had to wait for everybody in our Lower Intermediate level to complete registration before we could have them. Students were still turning up to begin registration as September was drawing to a close, and we knew how long registration took so we despaired of ever getting our student cards. However, when Catherine got angry, she got her own way. She said she wouldn’t leave the office until they gave her a student card, and they handed it over within 10 minutes. The cards are not actually cards but little books with all our details and then lots of stuff written in Uyghur and Chinese. Unfortunately I don't think we get to keep them. : ( The next day Liam and I went in and used the same tactics to get our own cards. They looked like they might refuse until we told them that our friend had already got hers so it must be possible. Tobin didn’t get his card until very recently, despite going to the office practically on a daily basis to nag, and believes that we were only given ours because we are exchange students with Newcastle and therefore Anniwar wants to groom our recommendation. He’s very likely right. We thought (after consulting with Anniwar) perhaps we could use the student cards like replacement passports, so we could travel in Xinjiang after all and not waste our holiday.
One day during recreation of class that week, my phone started to ring and it was Anniwar. He told me to come up to the eighth floor and when I got there, he happily handed over our passports – early, no less. He’d sent staff members to the Bureau on several occasions and with their combined effort they had finally managed to procure our documents with a completed permanent residence permit stamp. Hallelujah!
It was too late for Catherine to go to South Korea so we decided we’d all travel round Xinjiang together. Catherine and I planned the route for the week’s trip, and then we went to some seedy little office in the middle of nowhere to buy train tickets for the first leg of the journey. Just before we bought the tickets, we got a text message from our friend Frankie, also from Newcastle Uni, who was studying in Shanghai. She was coming to visit us in Urumqi, and had booked train tickets from Shanghai all the way out west. Erm… sorry, Frankie. We won’t be in Urumqi. Fancy coming travelling with us instead? Yep! So we were buying train tickets for four of us instead of the original three.
Later that week Catherine, Liam and I went to the south of the city to see Erdaoqiao. Catherine had already seen this part of town because she’d been to the university down there. The south of the city is incredibly Uyghur; in fact it’s a surprise to ever see Han Chinese down there. The main CBD is called Erdaoqiao. I absolutely love it now, but on the first occasion we went there it was horrible. I swear I wasn’t imagining it, but it seemed like everyone there was staring at us with more than the usual hostility – more with a desire to slit our pasty Western throats. The staring at the university had already considerably lessened, and so this staring really hit me for six. Liam felt the same, and we were both really paranoid about being mugged as we’d heard so many stories about mugging and pickpocketing in Erdaoqiao. Catherine was absolutely oblivious to all this hostility, but Liam and I felt intensely uncomfortable. Now I’ve been to Erdaoqiao several times and never once felt this way about it; I like it more than the Han parts of town and the Uyghurs all seem so friendly and nice. I can’t think what happened the first time I went! Maybe it was all in my mind, perhaps I was subconsciously intolerant; I don’t know. Anyway, the deep south of Xinjiang, like the south of Urumqi, is really Uyghur; and that was exactly where we going. Liam and I were suddenly not so keen to go on our travels.
The day before we started off on our trip, Frankie arrived after a two-day train journey on a sleeper. Also, Catherine’s friend William, originally from Hong Kong but studying in Almaty in Kazakhstan, came to visit with his friend and fellow Almaty University student Kim Minseon, from South Korea. We all went out as a group and enjoyed our last night in Urumqi at one of the many vibrant night markets. The next morning, furnished with my passport, some information about the south of Xinjiang and a not very keen desire to actually go, I set off with the others on our travels.

We went up to the top of the hill in the park at the end of our road. That is the view of Urumqi in the background, and the green buildings is the complex where I live. Everyone China-posing: l-r: Minseon, Liam, Catherine, William, Frankie.

At the same Sichuan restaurant where the photo a few posts ago was taken. Minseon and Liam are standing; William, Catherine and Frankie seated. You'll notice I am cleverly not in any of these photos.

Damn, I'm in this one. This is me at the night market.

And this, *ahem* artistically blurred photo is me eating Uyghur ice cream at the night market: Heaven.