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.

Dunhuang

I am way too busy to be spending any time catching up with the blog - so much of the summer is unaccounted for in the blog - and because of the camera theft in Barcelona some of it will never be documented. Still, I'm dedicating break time to at least posting individual pictures and very short stories. Here is a picture of the sand dunes in Dunhuang, the infamous location of the donkey wine adventure. As I said, you fly into the oasis that makes up Dunhuang by covering some of the most inhospitable desert you can imagine. We stayed at a very nice, and, sadly, essentially empty hotel on the edge of these massive sand dunes (the hotel folks were very happy to have us there). You could rent a bike and ride over to the edge of the dunes, but it cost something to actually get past the gate - once there you can ride camels and go sled riding down the dunes. It was an absolutely astonishing experience to sit out on the balcony, watch the sun go down, and the dunes slowly disappear - matched only by getting up early to see them reappear over breakfast in the morning. It was a short trip into town for donkey wine, cold noodle soup and a walk around a great traditional market.

Kasgar

I've been promising to talk about Kasgar, my favorite part of last summer's China trip, but have had no time - and certainly have no time right now - but I'm going to go ahead and post some pictures now anyway. Kasgar is about as far west as you can go in China, and it really felt much more like the Middle East than in China. A good friend of mine found that she could easily chatter away with the merchants in the marketplace in Turkish. What was amazing is that in the space of an hour we went from the bustling traditional marketplace to a cybercafe, where it was possible to get a moche for 28 yuan (which meant that it cost almost exactly what it would cost in the US) and also check your email. In the market itself you would stumble across these amazing stalls full of anything you could imagine. I love the picture at the top - I was standing on the wall above the stall, leaning forward, to get the shot as symetical as I could. If you look at the bottom of the picture you can see the dried snakes, which you grind up and put into hard liquor to make "snake wine" (which is, like donkey wine, an aphrodesiac). After walking past the dentist's office I was glad that my teeth were in good order.