Dance Party

This is exactly the sort of stuff I come to China for. Last night after dinner I rode my bike over to the building where English Corner was supposed to be. When I got there I noted a lack of students and made a few phone calls to confirm that English Corner did not in fact start until some time in October. I chatted with a few students who were getting out of class and then decided to ride around campus a little. Following some interesting sounds the first thing I came to was a bunch of the new freshmen students doing some night time military training. I stopped and watched for a minute but watching people chanting "one, two, three" while walking around isn't that interesting. I rode on and after a while I started to hear what sounded like central Asian dance music. I kept going until I found an area that was clearly a group of dorms. In the big space between two of these dorms were maybe 200 or more Uyghur students some of whom were dancing while the others had formed a big circle around them.

I stopped and got off my bike to watch. Unfortunately I didn't have my camera with me but it was so dark that I doubt the pictures would look like much anyways. I stood around watching and before long a few students came up and started to try and talk to me. They didn't have much English, one said they were all Chemistry majors, but I figured out a few things. This party wasn't a weekly occurrence it was a celebration of the holiday that marked the end of Ramadan. The music was really different from the types the Chinese students listen to. The closest thing I had heard before was in India, and actually the dancing even looked a little similar. There were definitely more people watching than dancing and with the darkness I don't know how many people even noticed me there. While me and the students had basically exhausted our limited mutual vocabulary another friend of theirs spoke a lot more English. I had met him before in a supermarket where he introduced himself as Hussain, and when I didn't hear him said, "you know like Saddam Hussein."

Hussain convinced me to try to try out some dancing, which pretty much involved me walking around trying to figure out the beat. It didn't seem to formal and people said I did OK. After that some of the people who were running the music saw me and asked me to introduce myself to everyone. Now there's something that doesn't happen in the US. If I show up somewhere I've never had everyone stop so that I could greet the crowd. They played a number more songs after this. The whole thing got done at about 11. The last dance was something called a Sama which involved everyone dancing around in a big circle while sort of skipping and occasionally cheering. Some of the cheering was just sort of like "Yeah!" but sometimes they'd alternate in "Allah!" It was really fascinating and I'm glad that I stumbled on it.

To finish the story of the washing machine Ma Ming and a worker showed up unannounced at around 12:30 today, given how weird the times are here that's a little earlier then it seems. They looked around for a minute and then the worker left and said he'd be back later. Ma Ming wanted to go to lunch and I agreed but told him he should come back in 45 minutes so I could shower first. We had lunch at a place just outside of campus before he dropped me back off. Later two worker showed up with Ma Ming, after nap time where nothing gets done, it took them a while but they both fixed the washing machine and the sink in my bathroom that was leaking onto the floor. All in all it worked out about as well as I could have hoped.