After two weeks of hitting the places-I-couldn’t-live-in-China-and-not visit as well as some more unique and rustic corners of the Chinese map, I hopped on a plane to Xinjiang. Xinjiang is the largest Chinese province and the farthest west yet the ethnic group from the area, the Uyghur, has more in common with Turkey in culture, language, and religion than the Middle Kingdom. The difference became apparent the moment our flight landed.
Our smiling guide met my friend and I at the airport, and I was instantly praised for my German ancestry. (Later I found out that our guides nickname in “German” because he loves the German people so much.) Immediately after that unusual statement, our guide announced that he was Uyghur and Muslim and that we would be leaving Urumqi immediately because the city contained too many Han Chinese.
The cityscape gave way to desert on our drive to the oasis town of Turpan. Fields of trellised grapes only days away from harvesting flew by our car window. Dotted among the fields were patches of poplar trees shading sun-baked homes in no danger of melting in the hottest place in China, which received no real rain. Occasionally we passed a donkey cart filled with watermelon or carrying colorfully-clod woman and children catching a ride.
Before dinner I took a stroll through the local market that smelled significantly better than the markets of Shanghai. Instead of oil drum lid-fryers cooking stinky tofu, white dressed men pulled nan from ancient wood-burning stoves. Instead of hanging chickens next to butcher’s stall were giant racks of lamb.
My first dinner in Xinjiang can only be described as discombobulating. It started off innocently enough. Our large group of travelers settled down within a restaurant sheltered under hallways of grapevines. We were served in the familiar buffet style of too many dishes of odd food that none of us would ever order on our own.
Everything was going fine until the entertainment started. Somehow the traditional dancers twirling to traditional songs turned into Uyghur Disco with tiny lead dancers moving to the very not traditional “Gasolina” as strobe lights flashed. At about that time, the entire sheep (not lamb) on a spit was plopped on our table. Nothing associated with Silence of the Lambs could possibly be as terrifying as that cooked carcass. Prepared by the King of Lamb, the meat was supposed to be the best in town.
Whle our host was trying to figure out how to carve the massive entrée, the head tiny dancer managed drag me onto the dance floor to teach me their style of dancing, which the only part I understood was waving my arms in the air to what sounded like a Middle Eastern influenced song put to a techno beat. While spinning in a circle with dozens of local woman, the lights flashed so slowly that more than once I crashed into someone because I just couldn’t see.
As one of my fellow travelers put it, this scene might be one of the oddest of his life. I quickly had the realization that I was NOT in the China that I know.
