First day in Kashgar - Day 3 of trip

Day 4: Arrive Kashgar at noon

My hotel is only 35 kuai a night! score! The two guys in my room have both been on the road for a while judging by their smell. I vacated the room pretty quickly on account of said smell and went to go walk around the old town of the city. I had a wonderful lunch of garbanzo beans with a really spicy sauce and a piece of nan for 2 kuai. There are also otherworldly delicious bricks of walnuts and carmel that I would have eaten all day if I had not thought I should eat lunch. After I was accosted by a group of kids who all wanted to play with my camera resulting in at least 20 blurry pictures of eyes and teeth since the zoom was set to maximum the whole time.



I saw another foreigner, one of the only I had seen so far so naturally I made friends - he had a really nice camera so at first I thought he might have a really cool job like photographing for National Geographic or something but no such luck.

Doorfront written in Uigher. Until 1984 Uigher was written in a roman alphabet but rumor has is that the chinese government changed it to arabic because the Uighers had too much of a leg up over the Han chinese in learning english. This sounds crazy until you hear a Uigher speak english and compare it to the shitty pronunciation of the rest of the country.

narrow streets that wind all the way through old town in no particular pattern

Boys playing pool on the side of the street

Uigher man serving food to children at lunch time from school

Uigher girl eating lunch

We walked around for a while and ended up wandering into a courtyard where an old woman made us feel completely at home and fed me pomegranates from the tree outside her window. She also taught me the Uigher name for them: it sounds like anna. While I was enjoying my ana, which was so unripe it made all the muscles in my jaw ache, a little boy came out with a soccer ball and wanted me to play with him so I did for about ten minutes until his mother came and put an end to our game. Party pooper.

Pomegranates

Old woman who fed us

I also tried this delicious sort of candy / who knows what the fuck it was, that a woman on the side of the street was breaking off in giant chunks with a chisel. The outside of the big circular candy "wheel" seemed to be covered in green moss in the same way those cheeses have the hard red skin on the outside. The woman gave me some for free and I tried to steer clear of the moss. It tasted kind of like a cross between rock candy and honey - who knows what it was.

There was a Mosque about 5 miles outside the city I wanted to see, so I suggested that we rent bikes and peddle out there. My bike was stuck in third gear the whole time or so it seemed... so while being fun the trip was slightly more arduous than I would have liked. The tomb / Mosque was much cooler than expected though, and we even got a dance performance complete with a plate of grapes to munch on while we watched.

The tomb outside the city

On the way back through the city we caught the sunset which lit up all of the mud houses and made it look more reminiscent of Jordan or Beirut. The bicycle trip back through old town was very pretty as it was dusk and the smoke from the chuar fires were filling the air and catching the last light in the sky. Almost back to the hotel an old Uigher man stopped us on the street and wouldn't let us go any farther unless we stopped to smoke the joint he was rolling with him. That got us enticed enough to look at the carpets he had inside his store which took a lot of oohing and ahhing and some more joints. Finally I knew I was going to buy something if we stayed any longer so we left with promises to return later in the week.