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.