In Them Old Cottonfields Back Home

I know I said I was going to start at the beginning but sometimes it's also better to capture things while there fresh so today I'm going to jump right to something I did today, going on a moto ride outside of town. Ma Ming, he has the job that Teddy had at my last school, showed up unannounced at my apartment at 11 this morning, that might not seem that early but remember that everything is about two hour later here so 11 am is more like 9 am. He invited me on ride in the country side outside of Alaer. As he explained it most of the farmers there are people whose families originally came to Xinjiang as soldiers and a lot of the former soldiers stayed and formed farming communities. Xinjiang is apparently known for it's cotton and as we drove out of town, which takes approximately five seconds from the school gate, I was field after field filled with cotton.

Now I was riding on the back of Ma Ming's moto and while the traffic around here is really sparse the whole thing made me nervous anyways since the last time I was on his moto he came to a sudden stop which sent both of us stumbling off it. This wouldn't have been a big problem except that my leg hit the exhaust pipe which was really hot and I burned the back of my leg. Ma Ming also has a bad habit of not paying enough attention to the road. He would often be tying to talk over his shoulder to me and even sometimes gesturing with his hand while trying to drive. The whole thing made me constantly worried I was about to go flying off into a ditch.

Now the area outside of town is actually beautiful. The big green fields of cotton are ringed with trees to prevent soil erosion and to stop the powerful spring sand storms. It actually gives it a European look with shady roads and fields ringed with trees. We stopped at one point and Ma Ming went down and grabbed a handful of cotton out of one of the plants and gave it to me as a sort of souvenir. He said that when he was a student, he attended the school I know teach at as an undergraduate, the school would make the students spend a couple of days a year picking cotton. I asked why thinking it might be some sort of labor builds character communist thing, but he just said the school needed the money. He added that some of the poorer students will get jobs just before the break picking cotton at the rate of about 1 RMB for 1 kilogram of cotton.

We continued on and came to a little town that grew dates even having a few statues of the red dates the grew. Ma Ming said that they weren't really ready yet but would be by the end of the month. We passed a little park where someone was taking wedding pictures. We finally stopped for lunch in one little town where we ate Uyghur food which despite involving plates of rice and meat along with tea I'm told is quite different from Chinese food. After that he took me back. It was a really nice trip and I think the closer parts of it will be quite accessible by bike as well.