Xin Jiang Hotel Urumqi

... a cold a blustery autumn day. We were glad we had gloves and scarves! There were a few families out walking, and more appeared as the sun came out. <br> <br>There was some confusion about our hotel. The one we were supposed to stay at had been pulled down a year ago! It was half way through a complete re-build.<br><br>But we were 'upgraded' to a 5* hotel, which was fine - nothing special; a typical 'business' hotel - could have been ...

... A route of over 4000 kilometres.<br><br>The Chinese are brilliant at building roads through incredibly difficult terrain - as we saw when we travelled on the Karakorum Highway from China to Pakistan in 2007.<br><br>For this entry I will let the photos tell the story!

... game. The highlight of the my afternoon was kicking LX's butt at the air hockey table. Unfortunately that attracted a bit too much attention from the mostly male video arcade hangerouters (on top of the usual "which minority group is she?" curiousity) so, feeling slight unnerved, for the rest the time we spent in there I took to hiding behind Ma Jun and LX while they played some kind of mortal kombat game that they used to play when they were in ...

... Chinese people show their affection through food. She was pretty keen on me and wouldn't take no for an answer. After I got back, LX and his friend Ma Jun (who is Hui) took me to a Hui market area selling traditional foods. The food was good but we got harassed continuously by two wasps that were pretty keen on sharing our meal with us. Plus I got stared at a lot again. After being mistaken for being Kazak or Russian (?!) for the past few days, I was not particularly phased, but I ...

... trip. LX pretty much bullied the travel agent, Lirong, into going on the tour to take care of me. I am not really sure how he managed to do this, but she gave in. She'd never been to Kanas before and business was lousy (riots and all that) which meant her boss was willing to let her go for free. Besides, LX had pestered her to the point where she was worried if anything happened to me up there, he'd be out for her blood. After scaring the living daylights out of Lirong, we went out for dinner.

... guide, but I had kind of thought as much anyway after running to the bathroom several times in the middle of the night. It had been good to meet LX's friends and to go do something as inane as play pool. Wandering around Changji put me completely at ease and destroyed any last butterflies of fear I might have been feeling, but I was worried that my body was trying to tell me, in an extremely unsubtle manner, that something was wrong.

... and that what westerners had written about it was biased and insensitive. I told him that I had not had any access to western news for the last week and so had no idea what reports he was talking about but that he should realized that there is no uniform western view of anything. For every 10 westerners you ask about any issue, you will likely find 10 very different, often opposing, views. I told him that I was not sure which reports had been publicized in the news here, but ...

... like $13 i think). I was a little worried that the cards would not work but they did so i was happy. Currently I am having a really great time, but I am a little ready to go home to Beijing so that I can talk to Chris and see his face. So far on this trip I have already done stuff i will most like likely never do again even if i come up here because i don't know how to go about getting to these places.

so it turned out that it was a convoy of i think 4 buses. arna, who i met at the station was on another but, but we swapped mobile numbers and decided to wait for each other at the terminal in urumqi if we didn't meet again. she had booked a hotel and was hoping i could share costs. the folk on my bus were friendly enough, some were koreans, off to urumqi for business, i think.none, however none were chinese or seemed to know how to speak zhongwen (mandarin, the official national ...

... she relized her mistake, and the clerk walked slowly and unenthusiastically around the office chatting with people, then she returns to me to say those dreaded words, "mei yo!(don't have.) "Are we at the right post office?" "Yes, you are, but no package." She didn't even bother checking around in any storage room or anything, and she assured me that the package might possibly get there sometime, and probably maybe in the next 30 days. If it still doesn't turn up in 50 days, I would ...