Sept./Oct. 2004
 |
CONTINUED DESTINATION: URUMQI |
|
| Singing Between the Desert and Mountains, Part 2 | ||
<< back << homeIn spite of my love of wine, Turpan is only my second favorite day-trip from Urumqi. In my mind, you cannot beat a day out in Nan Shan. So, it was with unusual levels of enthusiasm that I went to work on the day we took the children out to Nan Shan.
Nan Shan is an entire range of mountains, perceived as the little brother to the more renowned Tien Shan. Dismissed in the travel guides, both Urumqi and Nan Shan are incredibly under-rated. Flip through a brand name travel guide on Urumqi and you’ll see what I mean. However, disrespect breeds freedom from tourists, and this makes the city and Nan Shan even more magical. Nan Shan retains snowcapped peaks and glaciers even in July. You can visit a whole number of locations in the range of mountains depending on your taste: grasslands and alpine foothills for horse riding and a general easy day out, alpine peaks with rivers and forest for hiking, ridges ideal for rock climbing and of course, the glaciers. The trip started with a two-hour bus ride. The kids boarded the coaches from outside my drinking-spot-of-the-month: the piazza square outside the people's theatre in Nan Men. Nothing beats open-air drinking with grilled lamb kebabs, cold Uighur noodles and fresh ice cream all for less than $2 USD. The kids were charming and at worse only mildly cheeky, which was normal. The bus took us out of Urumqi and much in the Chinese style, there was a TV on board entertaining our students with DVDs of their favorite Chinese pop-stars. We had a tour guide on board, which confused me but I assumed that she was automatically included when we hired the private bus. Talking in a microphone, she attempted to bond with the kids, telling them to call her Auntie Helen. Even in China, the kids had to laugh at this attempt of trying to win them over. Auntie Helen wasn't inept though; she soon understood that unless she changed tact, her street cred with the children would be unrecoverable over the next two bus-hours. Unfortunately the change in tack, was, you guessed it… singing. It was happening all over again. There was no way out. She was singing and she had a microphone. Even worse, her voice wasn't a patch on Vivian's. At least this time, I was able to sink into my bus seat and plug into my Discman. After spending some quality time with the music of Shakira, I looked up to find a bus full of happy, enraptured students, some of whom were singing along. Clearly, there are still many things I don’t understand about China and I’m afraid that there is much I can learn from Auntie Helen. Who would have thought? Final chorus Only a few days ago, Auntie Helen held my students' attention for a rough, long bus ride. I'm still marveling at what I witnessed. With all my cultural drawing-back on the issue of singing, perhaps I was missing a fundamental part of my acclimation process, perhaps it's time I embraced singing and song? I didn’t think this would be the lesson I’d learn by leaving my career and moving to Central Asia. It’s a nice lesson though; neither morbid nor controversial like what the rest of the world seems to be communicating at the moment.
I'm not sure if moving here was my quarter-life crisis. I never really had a sense of desperation or a need to flee my old life. Either way, things are going according to plan in their own special way. It seems that’s what happens to you when you leave the day job. This morning two of the teachers, for reasons I have yet to understand, were teaching the lyrics: “We will…we will…rock you” in the classroom next to mine. There was choral screaming, and thumping—all the sounds that would indicate, good or bad, their lesson was in full-swing. After a minute of deafening noise, I gave up on my lesson. My students couldn’t hear me and the screaming of the Australian teacher, Peter, was more amusing to us anyway. Then, so much like the rest of my time here that it should have been predictable, my students started murmuring along to the sounds coming through the wall, “we will…we will…rock you!” Finally, after months of misunderstanding it, I started singing too. It’s surprisingly true—about Urumqi and everything in it: It is misunderstood, but it will, it will, rock you. Catherine Barr is 25-year-old English teacher who recently relocated from London to Urumqi. |
||
|
| Briefs |
| Just the Facts |
| Budget Travel How-to |
| Destinations |
| Cow Rules in Jaisalmer |
| Urumqi Karaoke, part 1 |
| Urumqi Karaoke, part 2 |
| Bolivian Llama Mama |
| Lingua Franca |
| I Pee Postcards |
| A Traveler's Life |
| Audrey's Song |
| Health |
| Traveler's First-Aid Kit |
| English Spoken Here |
| Faces of Puerto Rico |
| When in Home |
| Guidebook Writing |
| Links |
| InsideOut Free Newsletter: |
|
Xinjiang and Urumqi: Geography, History, Destiny Urumqi is the capital of Xinjiang (pronounced SHIN-JAHNG), China’s second, lesser known "Tibet." The Xinjiang autonomous region is an area about the size of Western Europe. Originally, the area now called Xinjiang was a massive no-man’s land between China and the eastern “-stans” of Central Asia and Russia. Power struggles rocked the area in colonial times and in the 20th century Xinjiang’s borders were finally closed off by the Communists, sealing it off as a part of China. The result was an unnatural marbling of many desert tribes, mountain cultures and other ethnicities who often traded outwards, rather than within the region, and who now live together as “Xinjiang.” Today Xinjiang hosts a significant part of the Silk Road— for which the city of Urumqi is a popular hub. Xinjiang is China’s largest “province” (officially an autonomous region) and shares similarities with Tibet, including an uncomfortable history of displaced people. In its time Xinjiang has been an independent Central Asian nation, though for the most part area wasn’t linked to any nation at all, an unowned vast desert and mountainous land. Indigenous people within this patchwork include the Uighers, Kazahs, Hui Chinese, Russians, Tajiks, Uzbeks and more. Even within each ethnicity there are cultures and tribal subcultures. Xinjiang is bigger than Tibet, and has the world's second largest desert, the Taklamakan; the world’s second lowest point below sea level, Akdingkol Lake, now a giant salt plain; alpine forests and Mongol-esque grasslands. The region also functions using two time zones. Everything official—flights, banks, schools, run according to Beijing time—a city located roughly 4,000 km to the east. The daylight hours in Xinjiang don’t correspond to Beijing time, so the real lifestyle is two hours “behind,” in what they call Xinjiang time. My first working day started at 10 a.m. Beijing time, or an early 8 a.m. in real terms, Xinjiang time. The city of Urumqi spreads outwards, with ethnic markets and semi-desert until it reaches the Kazak yurts (tents) on the fringes of the surrounding mountains two or three hours from the center. To the west, east and north, the urban-ethnic mosaic turns into snow capped mountains taller than European Alps. To the south, the environment rolls out to some lower Alpine mountains (Nan Shan) and the desert two hours away. In the north, a Germany-sized grassland, the Junggar Basin, spans the hundreds of kilometers from Urumqi to the Altay Mountains on the border with Mongolia and Russia. Kazakhstan,
Kirgistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Kashmir and Pakistan all share Xinjiang’s
border as it runs to the west and finally kisses Tibet. |
