Back in XinJiang on Vacation

Hi everyone, I'm in XinJiang again. The last time I was here was 2006, around this same time of year. I've taken a vacation from work down in Chengdu and I couldn't be happier to have done it. XinJiang is really pretty paradisaical in the summer. It's cold, and I'm sure beautiful in its arctic way (much like my own Montreal) in the winter, but in the summer it's all blue skies, hot deserts, vineyard oases, tall mountains, clear blue lakes, pine forests, tall minarets, dusty clay mosques, gleaming white mosques, sweet grapes, squashed-looking peaches and everyone speaking all sorts of languages you've never heard before like Uyghur and Kazakh and Mongolian. And a lot of Chinese, as always. The Chinese isn't what I'm here for, though, I get enough of that and love it back in Chengdu.

Here's an excerpt of an e-mail I just wrote to my mom, and then forwarded to the rest of my family because I figured it was a nice 'n' concise little update.
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I'm in Turpan, a major grape-growing city in XinJiang, about 3 hours from the capital, Urumqi (Oo-room-chee). We spent the last 3 days at Tian Chi (Tee-en Chur) - Sky Pool, a high mountain lake north of Urumqi. We stayed in a yurt with a group of Kazakh families who run a little extra-rustic bed and breakfast type operation up there. Kazakh as in Kazakhstan, although they live in China, of course. I learned a few words of Kazakh, but that's it. Anyway, the mountains were beautiful. Megan and her parents said it reminded them a little of the Sierras in California. It was all open meadows and lines of pine trees running up and down the steep slopes. Lots of eagles and hawks. We saw some ibex too (ibexes?).
Now, in Turpan, I'm going to try to learn a little more Uyghur (wee-ger). I'm at 4 phrases so far. Unfortunately I lost my only Uyghur textbook over a month ago in ChongQing, just after I'd cracked it open to try to get a head start on the language for my trip up here.


P.S. A lot of people translate Tian Chi (天池) as "Heavenly Lake", but I think that's lame. I stand by "Sky Pool".