到了! (I'm Here!)

Well, after a full 24 hours of travelling, I have finally reached my final destination for this week's journey: Kashgar, Xinjiang, PRC. Kashgar is the westernmost city (I emphasize city here, for there are other smaller towns and villages) in China. To put it in perspective, if I decided to walk directly south from here, I would end up in Delhi, India. And so, it has been a long trip.

I left last night from Kunming at 10:45PM, a mere forty-five minutes late. Upon arriving in Xi'an at about 12:30AM, I took the bus from the airport into town (a 37 kilometer distance!) and then a taxi to Northwest Polytechnical Institute to meet my friend Aftron, another Whittie, who is currently teaching there. We stayed up till like 4 in the morning chatting, and we had to be back up at 8AM so I could get back to the airport for my noon o'clock flight to Urumqi, a three-and-a-half-hour flight. Arriving in Urumqi gave me my first record for the day (the second being at the furthest west city in China): at 2,250km, it is the city the furthest away from the ocean in the entire world. Good thing I'm a mountain person.

And actually, it's high plains, so I was feeling right at home. It was hot (over 30 degrees), but at least it was as dry as Colorado, a welcome change. I had a four hour layover there, so I wandered around the "neighborhood" the airport was in trying to avoid the taxis who were desperately honking at me (apparently they were convinced I needed a ride to somewhere and couldn't just be exploring around the airport). I actually stumbled across a cute little park, so I parked myself there in the shade enjoying the dry air.

Then it was on to Kashgar. I arrived at about 9:45PM, but since this area should technically be like five time zones behind Beijing, it was essentially only treated like 7:45PM. I guess I'm going to have to get used to it for the time I'm here, but it's very Chinese that officially they all run on Beijing time, but actually that's just a facade. From what I understand, businesses don't open til like 10AM Bejing time, lunch isn't served until 2PM Beijing time, etc.

As for first impressions, in Urumqi, I was not able to see much of the actual city, but from what I could tell, the Uighur influence, at least in terms of architecture, is not very big. Whereas here, it does really feel like a whole 'nother country (Texas watch out). At the same time, it's typically Chinese, which just confuses my head.

I had an amazingly delicious bagel (first one in who knows how long) while exploring the streets this evening. The vendor didn't speak any Chinese, which meant we resulted to the pointing to different bills game. I was expecting that since we are technically in China that people would speak more Chinese than they seem to. Looks like I'll need to learn Arabic next (after Spanish of course).

And so far, I've only had "Hey, you American war monger" shouted at me once, so I consider that a good day. And now I'm ready for bed!