Dunhuang Market

Once again, I have no time for devoting more effort to getting caught up with the blog, so I'm stealing a couple moments here and there to post one picture and briefly comment on it (before it all fades away completely). Here's another picture from the time I spent in Dunhuang in western China, which, with the exception of Kasgar, was my favorite part of my time in China. This is a shot taken in the traditional market in Dunhuang. I especially love the live fish, just inches away from where he is grilling dinner - guess we know it's fresh. What a wonderfully weird time - it was the same day as the donkey wine adventure - about a block away. There was also a murder across the street while we were drinking the donkey wine - some woman stabbed her boyfriend to death right out on the sidewalk (and you thought those things only happened in the U.S.). We passed through the market again a couple days later and I had cold soup, which is exactly like it sounds. I was hanging around with the tour guide and he asked if I wanted to eat with him - and seemed very pleased when I said yes. He asked if I wanted the cold soup, which was very popular in the summer. Being hard of hearing I thought he said cold soup, but figured it was just a Chinese word that I wasn't picking up. It turned out to be cold, noodle soup, with a bit of a hot sour (or in the case, tepid sour) soup taste to it - he told me that it was popular there in the summer as a break from the heat. My friend Yanfeng walked in and was very pleased that I was eating a bowl of the cold soup and plopped down and had a bowl himself. That said, we then jumped on the bus and took off for a couple hour drive on one of the bumpiest roads in the world - and I was sitting in the last row - and I just about lost my dinner, which would have thrown away any points I had scored for downing my entire huge bowl of cold soup. I swapped with another professor, using the excuse that I had enjoyed the extra leg room long enough and should really share, crept up to the front of the bus, and managed to survive. All the sloshing around just about did me in.