Silk Road, Part 3: Xinjiang

At long last! You know, I've only been back for a month and a half...

First stop was Urumqi! It's the capital of Xinjiang Province. For those of you who don't know, Xinjiang Province is the huge northwestern province that is also sometimes known as the Uyghur Autonomous Region. Urumqi has a lot of Han (the people we normally think of as "Chinese") people, but in general Xinjiang is home to a lot of people of the Uyghur nationality.

We didn't stay in Urumqi long. Just one night. I was feeling a little ill (still due to dehydration - DON'T BE ME), so I mostly read. We took it as something of a rest day before we went to Kashgar.

And boy, did we need it. Xinjiang was where we did most of our hiking.

Here is some sort of reservoir scenic spot:

But just look at how pretty.

Mary and Elizabeth! And yes - that's snow!

And we hiked to Shipton's Arch:

You stand on this hill that you just climbed. There's the arch. You look ahead. Through the arch, the world falls away.

We also saw a glacier. My first glacier!

More snow! Such a pretty hike.

And that's a glacier.

Shelby is from Texas. She couldn't stop making snowballs.

In Kashgar (which is nearly as far west as one can go in China), we met some Uyghur students and cooked with them. My knife skills were appreciated, but they were so much better! One of the girls belonged on the Food Network.

Gotta fan those kebabs.

Our new friends!

They know the Lizzie McGuire Movie, it seems. And we somehow remembered the words to that song from the finale. It was quite the bonding experience.

The whole Silk Road Trip was quite the bonding experience. Afterwards, we found ourselves missing group meals and spending all of our time together. We started throwing parties. We've had Halloween and Thanksgiving so far. Our Christmas party is Saturday. We invited our roommates and our teachers, and we're going to cook a little American food to show them.

I have a little over two weeks left in China. It's hard to believe.

I'm going to start working on some more reflective posts about the end of my time here, and I'm also going to see if I can put some things together about Calligraphy Street and Xi'an traditional crafts. Stay tuned for those and for a more in-depth post about Chengdu!