January 4th -- Alaer, Aksu, and Urumqi

Urumqi is not a good looking city by any means. From the air, when it is visible, unlike most of Xinjiang Urumqi's location on the edge on the edge of the mountains means that it is foggy and cloudy sometimes unlike Alaer Urumqi seems to be one with smoke stacks dotting the landscape. The dry alien terrain that surrounds it, not really a desert but still devoid of most plant life, doesn't help the looks of the city any. On the ground it has all the charm of the city like Camden New Jersey in mid winter. There is some snow on the ground, though how dry it is means not much, but the cold keeps it from evaporating until it becomes a dull gray and brown. This city also suffers being both too big and too small. Urumqi is by far the biggest city in Xinjiang but in this case it is just spreading out, and has more factories and smokestacks than I've ever seen in a major city. It also too small in that it doesn't really have one concentrated central area. There are five story buildings all over the place but few real skyscrapers and not much of a downtown. The one thing it has going for it, is that unlike most Chinese cities many of the buildings are painted colors other than gray, must be the Uyghur influence.

My first flight from Aksu left at 11 in the morning which doesn't sound early until you consider that sunrise is about 10am. I didn't think any of the normal busses from Alaer would be running so early so I arranged a car to pick me up at 7am. That turned out to be so early that the roads were virtually desert and we made incredible time through the darkness. It was so dark that even with the high beams on I could barely see anything more than 100 feet in front of the car, which isn't much at 120 km/h. That was unless there was another car heading the opposite direction whose lights would then illuminate it miles out. It's a bad habit in China that since no one wears their seat belts I've gotten out of the habit. People even sometimes get offended if I put on my seat belt as if I was suggesting that they were a bad driver, which of course they are.

The Aksu airport was in what appeared to be a converted barn when I flew in August, but sometime in between they opened a gorgeous new terminal, like all airports vaguely modeled after the slopping roof of Dulles, which made me think I had come to the wrong place. Air travel in China is quite comfortable. Unlike in the US where air ravel is affordable to enough people that airports have become like crowded bus stations, only they don't grope you at the bus station, the relative expense of air travel in China, it's cheap for me but unaffordable for my students, means that it's still pretty empty and peaceful. Even the Uyghur people on the plane were wearing leather fancy leather jackets or fur coats. The flight was a little delayed but we got to Urumqi fairly quickly with little trouble.

I don't usually travel by myself. For all the traveling I do I'm still a pretty shy person. When I first got to the Urumqi airport I couldn't for the life of me find a place to get a legitimate taxi and I ended up wandering around for half an hour before I paid twice what I should have to get to my hotel. Traveling alone also effected what I ate. I tried to go to some local restaurant but they didn't speak any English and didn't try to meet me half way, i.e. I pointed to something I saw but they just shot back a lot of questions to me in really fast Chinese. I ended up eating at KFC twice, just because it was easier. The biggest problem with traveling along though, is that I have no one to make comments to. It was something like -15 degree Celsius when I arrived in Urumqi but it just wasn't the same without someone to commiserate with.