Henan Pictures

I've been having trouble connecting with Blogger lately. I'm not sure if it's something with the website or with my internet service. I got sick of trying to put more pictures and video on here with the connection problem, so this is all for now. If it gets more consistent in the next few days then I'll try adding more. Enjoy!

Here are a few pictures from my two days in Zhang Village near Linpa, Henan. Happy Guy took my camera away from me about 5 minutes after I got there so most of the pictures are "Chinese style". That means they're either tilted or not centered.


Here I am with Happy Guy, soon after my arrival.


Stewie, HG's son. He's 9. You can see the neighbor's grandkid in the background.

Here I am in front of the house. It's the traditional style of a house with an enclosed courtyard. The sign over my head is wishing Zhang Cheng (HG's daughter) a happy 12th birthday. The others are (l to r) HG's little sister, HG's older sister, HG's wife, and HG's mom.


This is HG's little sister and her son. He's actually 5, he's just a little small for his age. He's got the pose down, though.



This is a short video just after Amber blew out her candles. You can get a look at the cake. Chinese people know how to make a good looking cake.


Happy Guy took several videos trying to get in every single person at the party. Since the party spanned several rooms and more than one yard, I've only put in this one video to give you a taste. The very first lady you see sitting in the corner is Happy Guy's 90 year old grandmother.

A look at school life

I thought some of you might like to see some pictures of what I'm doing here. These first pictures are of my room, study table, and view out the window. Kunming is a really nice city. It actually has blue sky! I didn't think it was possible for a big Chinese city to have blue sky, but Kunming definitely has one of the bluest skies I've ever seen. It's also relatively warm (60s and 70s) since it's down next to Vietnam and Myanmar. It started snowing the day we left Shiyan so this is a nice change. Enough talking, here are some pictures!









We don't go very far from the building much since we're always studying. That pedestrian crossover in the above picture is the farthest we go most days. It's sad, I know. Blame it on homework. Speaking of homework, here are a few pictures of my homework for all you curious cats.


This is one of my journal entries. I messed up the sentence in the middle, hence the red ink. But overall it was good, so she drew one of her weird smileys at the end. Mv.


Here's a page from the text book. It's not all like this. This page is just packed with phrases to practice.


I get to trace a character and then practice writing it on my own. And then write it in a dictation quiz the next day. Today my quiz consisted of about 80 characters that I learned last week. It took a long time.

Spring Festival is around February 6th and 7th. Our teachers want to go home at that time, but our classes run through the 8th. Their solution is that we'll have class 6 days a week instead of 5 so we can finish three days early. It kind of stinks because now we only have one day off to rest our brains, but I can't really complain because I wouldn't want them to miss going home. It's their equivalent of Christmas, in terms of how important it is to go home and see family. Today, however, my brain is fairly relaxed. It's the first school day of the week and I didn't receive much homework at all. I've already finished it, in fact. So I have the next 6 or 7 hours to review, read, wander, or whatever else I can find to do. It should be interesting.

Crazy Awesome Weekend

As predicted, this past weekend was crazy awesome. Carole and Danielle came in from Wuhan about 1:30 in the morning Saturday. I had a wushu lesson at 9 so I didn't meet anyone before I left for that. I DID, however, get a thumbs up from one of the instructors at the gym. So far we've been taught by a girl who has been studying wushu about two months longer than us. They say after I practice one motion 100 times then one of the instructors will take the time to correct my mistakes. Needless to say, the fact that one of the instructors was actually paying attention and gave me a thumbs up made me really excited. I'm pretty sure I kept bringing it up the rest of the weekend. Anyhoo, I was out and about until after lunch, so around 12:30 I got back and found that the weekly ladies' brunch was wrapping up. That's when I got to meet our guests. Little did I know, the fun was just beginning.

Someone arranged a 2:30 trip to the orphanage Saturday afternoon, so we all piled on the bus and went to meet everyone else at the gate of the medical school. It was a cold and rainy day, so all the windows on the bus were fogged up. Of course, what could we do but draw baby feet and turkeys? Little known fact... apparently turkeys go "mrr mrr."


In this picture: (back l to r) Jessica, Megan, Danielle, William, David; (front l to r) Carole, Angelyn. Just a portion of the crew that went.


I've never been to the orphanage here because everytime I've tried to join in the trip got canceled. I was nervous about going this time because I didn't want to jinx it again, but we actually made it and were allowed in to see the kids. Unfortunately instead of 50 kids we were greeted by about 5 because the others had all been moved to a middle school with dorms that they could live in. We sang songs, passed out gloves, made a shopping list for our next visit, and just enjoyed visiting with so many people.


After we were done there, we all split up. Angelyn went to return the train tickets that I so painstakingly bought the other day and they decided 10 minutes later they didn't want. (just kidding, there was no pain involved) I went with Priscilla (in the pink in the picture above), Carole (the small one in the middle), Danielle (the tall one crouching in the front), and Jessica (has her hand on Danielle's head) to the bus station to buy new tickets and then behind the bus station to the Korean market for some Christmas shopping. I got some lights and they all bought hats. Priscilla actually bought a normal hat she could wear any day, Danielle and Carole bought some wicked awesome Russian/Chinese fur hats. I would have bought one except I had just bought one a day or two earlier. (If you remember, just before Halloween '06 I bought a big green army coat. Well, the hat matches it!) Afterwards, we went back to school and had dinner at Happy Guy's, followed by a night on the town with some other foreign friends at the disco in town. I have discovered that with a strobe light I can almost fake dancing ability. Almost.

Sunday we had our weekly meeting and then in the afternoon I went to teach English to the people who teach me wushu. (We pay each other with our respective teaching.) At 5 a bunch of us went to KTV. The K stands for karaoke, which is the unofficial pastime of China. We got an awesome room that had English lyrics that were mostly correct. Whitney Houston was singing some song about "blittersweat memories" but other than that it was just about right. My favorite was John dancing to "My Humps" (which is not a good song when you actually have the lyrics on the screen by you, be warned). I was devastated that we didn't discover the switch to turn on the strobe light until we were leaving, though. I could have practiced pretending to have dancing ability some more. Here you can see William and me holding on to John in front of a coffee/KTV place. It was actually the wrong place so were really just totally confusing the ladies in charge of opening the door and yelling welcome. They couldn't figure out if we were coming in or not, then we ended up walking down the street to the right place. Oops.


After an hour of singing we went around the corner to UBC Coffee (not the place in the picture above) and enjoyed a rare treat of fried ice cream balls, coffee, and spaghetti. Unfortunately it was in that order because the waitress thought I was joking when I ordered in Chinese so she only brought the stuff we ordered in English. We had our ice cream and then I had to ask where the spaghetti was. I couldn't finish it since I'd already had the ice cream, but some of the girls helped me out. I'm pretty sure I could have finished all of it if they had brought the spaghetti first. I know it's the same amount of food, but it's all in the order in which you eat it. I learned about it in physics in high school, trust me. Around 9 we were leaving and as we walked past People's Square we noticed that the nightly dance party was still going on. Basically every old person in town comes and makes a huge conga line and walks in a circle for three hours. We needed to work off that fried ice cream, so we all went and joined in. Jessica and Carole made a lot of new friends teaching the electric slide. I'm pretty sure if I go back tonight they'll all be practicing the "new American dance".


After line dancing ourselves to exhaustion, we all went back to our respective schools. At my school we ended up watching a movie and falling asleep with our cool new Russian/Chinese fur hats on. It's the best way to stay warm!


This morning Angelyn and I saw the Wuhan gals off at the bus station. And 5 minutes later we were bored, lonely, and sending them text messages to come back to us. So we went DVD shopping to distract ourselves. All in all, this weekend was a bit of a splurge in just about every way. We had an overdose of just about every good thing in life this weekend, and it was GREAT! Of course, what you don't get from reading this is all the hilarity and interplay between people. Or things like when Danielle played Mary Had a Little Lamb on the piano at the coffee shop and got yelled at by the manager. I will leave you with two photos in memory of our guests. The first is to show why I'm the designated umbrella carrier when Carole is walking by me. The other is a glamor shot they took in front of William and Priscilla's building at the middle school.

Wushu and Hotpot: A typical Tuesday

Today I got up and went to William's apartment at 9:30 to meet him and John for our weekly (in theory) wushu practice. In case you missed it, wushu is the general name for Chinese kungfu. Wushu is the art itself, kungfu is any wushu that focuses on fighting. There are other kinds of wushu that focus on art or health. We learn it every Saturday morning and have set aside Tuesday mornings as a practice session since all three of us are free that morning. John didn't come, and we still don't know why. I'm sure he'll give us some excuse involving butter (last time I was at his apartment, he and his wife had 31 sticks of butter in the fridge). I had fun practicing with William. He put on some traditional Chinese music, most of which was played on a pipa, a stringed instrument. At some point he decided to switch from traditional Chinese music to pop music which made for a hilarious sight. Us practicing wushu to pop music. It struck me as being so funny that I just had to video it. And here it is! Possibly the best video in the history of all videos. You be the judge...



So I left William's place just before 12 and walked to McDonalds so I could meet the girls for hotpot at 12:30. It was Angelyn, Jessica (both American), and Alice (Chinese). If you don't know, hotpot is when you get a big pot full of whatever you choose to eat for lunch, cook it over a fire in the middle of the table, and just eat straight out of the pot. It's usually a good way to die from an overdose of spicey food, but today's was mostly just hot from the fire that was in the middle of the table.

Here's the fish hotpot before we started eating.



And here it is after...



And to give you an idea of how dangerous this meal could have been, here's the pile of millions of fish bones on my plate at the end of the meal.



After lunch we headed back to school. At the bottom of our hill we stopped to pick up some milk tea to drink. Since Alice was still with us we decided to take advantage of her multilingual skills to find out exactly what all the different flavors are. She was tired or didn't want to lean through the window to read them all, so she just went in and sat down behind the counter. For some reason we found this incredibly cute so I got a picture of the booth and one of Alice taking our money like she worked there.




Every Tuesday at 3 Jessica and I go play majiang with Mike, an older man at our school, so we made our way to his apartment. Here are Mike and Jan. I'll let you guess which is which. (hint - Jan doesn't have a combover)



Jessica left at 5 to go prepare for a new class that began tonight, but I stayed for another hour so I could learn the basics of Chinese chess. I'm pretty sure that I could learn to love xiangqi (the Chinese name) more than majiang. How can you not like a game with elephants and cannons? There's even a palace and a river. Yeah, it's way cooler than normal chess.




I came back home at 6 to Study with some students, but they forgot to come so they will come over at 9 with another group that always comes on Tuesday nights. And that, after going all semester without a single class on this day, is a fairly typical Tuesday for me.

Month Discrimination

I realized today that I must hate November because I totally refused to blog during the entire month. It wasn't a bad month, I'm not sure why I unconsciously avoided blogging about it. We must have had an argument once and now I'm having trouble forgiving November for all the things it said about me. Forgiveness is a hard thing to dish out sometimes, I guess.

Well, to sum up November, it started getting cold for a while. And then it warmed up until we could wear short sleeves in the middle of the day. And then it got really cold again. One of the warm parts was Thanksgiving. It wasn't really cold at all on that day, and it was nice and sunny. We had a big dinner that night with two turkeys someone collected the weekend before in Wuhan, lots of homemade pies, various stuffings and gravies, more rolls than I ever imagined could possible fit in one room, and (of course) Chinese food. Since there were at least 70 people at the dinner, it took quite a while to get everyone through the line for turkey and western dishes. But I did manage to snag two pieces of pecan pie since I don't imagine we'll have any more of that this year. Unless someone mails us more karo syrup and pecans! Feel free.

Last night, to celebrate the last day of November and to bring in the Christmas season at full swing, Jessica came up with the idea of chopping down a real, live Christmas tree. She won't settle for a fake tree and none of the plant markets in town plan of having Christmas trees this year. It's a tradition in her family for them to all go out together and get a tree, kind of like the Griswald family Christmas or something. So she scouted a tree on the hill behind us and then we waited for dark to settle before we set out. Lacking a hatchet or saw, Jessica brought along her trusty kitchen cleaver to do the chopping. I just went along to provide light with my cell phone and to witness the possible hilarity. Nothing too out of the ordinary happened other than us chopping down a small pine tree in the middle of the night with a kitchen knife and nonchalantly carrying it back to our apartment building.



William and me sitting around before the caper. He didn't actually go, he stayed behind to keep our escape route clear. i.e. - fall asleep on the couch.



My cell phone in one hand and the cleaver in the other, Jessica is ready to lay into that tree. It was pitch dark out and we really couldn't see anything at all. The camera flash about burned our eyeballs out of their sockets.



After getting the tree, Zoe was trying to chop my head off.



Angelyn and Jessica were psyched about this tree. If you'll notice, the trunk is bristling with trillions of little death spikes. I didn't notice that in the dark, but luckily I didn't close my hand all the way on the tree.



I had fun whacking other trees with the cleaver. It cut into them better than I expected!



The finished product was a bonafide Charlie Brown Christmas tree. I'm considering getting one for my own apartment, except that it'll be dead in a week. Maybe I'll wait until the holiday is closer.

And that brings us to today. Today is December 1. It was in the city news last week that everyone was turning on their heat today, and sure enough when I woke up this morning there was hot water in the radiator pipes. I don't know if it's regulated by the city because it's such a large energy investment, but I think it's funny that the city decides when everyone in town gets hot radiators. It's good that they turned it on when they did, though. Today I woke up and it was a brisk 30 degrees out. That's -1 for you celsius people. I think right now it's up to about 47. The forecast for the rest of the week is a bit colder, so it looks like winter is finally here to stay.

The Silk Road, Part 2 - Kashgar

Sorry for the delay, we've been settling in for the last week. I believe that last time I left off with our arrival in Kashgar. Now, 6 of the last 7 nights had been spent on an airplane, bus, or train. Four of the last 7 nights had been spent sitting in a seat. Thank you Nancy in Xi'an and Chinese sleeper buses. We arrived in Kashgar and my watch said 7:30. Since all of China is in one time zone instead of 3 or 4, then it can be really confusing to be a couple thousand miles west of Beijing and still be on Beijing time. Because of this difference in longitude, they have two times in Xinjiang, oddly enough called Beijing time and Xinjiang time. Xinjiang time is two hours behind Beijing, so my watch said 7:30 but the locals were thinking 5:30. The sun wasn't up yet and there was absolutely no one out in the streets yet. Angelyn and I got a taxi to a hotel mentioned in our Lonely Planet guidebook (couldn't travel without it!) and secured lodging for one night. I don't know how, but we ended up with zero pictures of this place. It's a big place that has everything from cheap dorm style rooms to fancy rooms in the old Russian embassy that makes up the back part of the complex. The wall behind the reception desk was worthy of a picture in and of itself, but I guess we were too tired to dig out the cameras. Anyhoo, we cleaned ourselves up a bit and set out to explore the city. When we started walking a lot of the street vendors were just beginning to sell breakfast so we began experimenting with the bread they sell. Let me tell you, Muslim bread is usually covered in sesame (at least in this part of the world) and that just makes for awesome bread. The following are pictures from around the city.

It was good to see that the government was trying to stamp out poor driving.


The first half of the city that we walked through was just a typical Chinese city. We were a little disappointed. Then we came to People's Park. Every single town in China has a park named People's Park. The park in Kashgar has these wonderful tree-lined paths. The park seemed to go on forever. We made a mental note that this would be a great place to play Cops and Robbers sometime, if only we didn't live so far away.


We came out the far side of the park and were greeted by this sight as we passed over a bridge. That's the Old City of Kashgar, which definitely has more of the traditional desert/Muslim culture feel to it.


One of the first places we sought out when we reached the older part of town was the Bazaar. Kashgar is supposed to have an amazing Sunday Market that knocks most people speechless. We weren't there on a Sunday so didn't get to experience it. It's supposed to spill into the streets for blocks and blocks in every direction. We did get to experience the Sunday bazaar in Hotan, but that comes later.


The architecture in the Old City is definitely not traditional Chinese. It was great seeing something so different. If you're having trouble reading the signs it's because Arabic reads right to left. Try it that way.




The buildings went from mostly shops to mostly residences. The traffic practically disappeared and we were able to just stroll down some side streets and soak in the sights.




Most towns we went to had a new Chinese City and an Old City that was usually centered around a mosque. We knew that we were coming out on the street with Kashgar's big mosque, so here's the picture we took of it.

See the man in the red hat taking a picture of something off to the right? It turns out he was taking a picture of the mosque while we were taking a picture of the mall next to the mosque. Here's the actual mosque.


Here's a nice camel sitting outside the mosque. Their humps were a lot floppier than I expected. I guess they're filled with fat so what should I have expected?


After we walked around we found a place to eat lunch at had some nice kebabs. There are five different kinds of kebabs and I'm pretty sure one of them is sheep heart or kidney. The other four are really good, though. Meat and bread are 90% of the diet here, so most Americans would love it.

Two of the things we had in mind to do in Kashgar were to take a trip to Karakul Lake and to take a trip into the Taklamakan desert. We spent the afternoon scouting out travel agents who could help us arrange a trip. In the process we met a German student named Fabian. He had been studying in Shanghai and was taking a grand tour around China before returning home. We teamed up to split the cost of a trip to Karakul Lake and planned to leave the next morning at 6, local time, 8 Beijing time. And that is where I shall pick up next time. I'll leave with a teaser photo to pique your interest.

The Silk Road, Part 1 - Nashville to Kashgar

Well, after a few days of not being able to connect to the Blogger website I'm finally back. I'll be telling about my trip in parts so as not to overwhelm you with a twelve mile long blog entry. This is what I did for a lot of the time just before leaving for China... played Nintendo. It was fun, but I never did beat Zelda. HOWEVER, it turns out that James, one of the guys at my school this year, has a Wii. So I'll get a chance to finish without having to wait a year. I'm not sure if that's good or not. I might end up wasting way too much of my time. Good thing it's in another apartment. Moving on. I told some of this already, but it won't hurt you to read it again with pictures. Angelyn and I had planned to come back to China early this year so that we could explore the western end of China. It's home to the ancient Silk Road that led from China to India, Persia, and even to the Mediterranean. The events that follow are perhaps one of the events in my time in China that truly qualify as a full adventure.

I left Nashville on August 7, met Angelyn in Los Angeles, and we set off to China via Hong Kong and Xi'an. We landed in Xi'an the morning of August 9 and made our way to Nancy's apartment. Nancy is a lady who has been in China for 9 years and she always opens her apartment to visitors when they come to town. It was great to be back after 6 weeks and we were both excited to be on our way to the Xinjiang region of China. Our first day in Xi'an we walked around town a bit to wake ourselves up and try to get over jetlag. Nancy lives just down the street from the Big Goose Pagoda. (Side note: I took my mom here when she came to visit a few years ago and we saw a guy getting beat up with a 2x4. I knew you wanted to know that.)


Nancy had been gracious enough to arrange our train tickets from Xi'an to Urumqi, but due to the crowd there were no beds left on the train, only seats. Seats are better than standing tickets, though. So on August 10, after one night to recover from jetlag (Note: this is not enough) Angelyn and I set off on a 34 hour train to Urumqi. Our hard seat tickets lived up to their name quickly. Since our train left at almost 10pm, 34 hours on the train encompassed two nights. So for the next two nights we slept sitting up. Yay!



The people were quiet enough at night, but it still wasn't comfortable unless you were a tiny Chinese person who could curl up on the floor or in the lap of the person next to you. However, I'm a huge non-Chinese person who can't do either of these.



I did manage to claim the window seat on the second night and use the edge of the table to sleep on. If you ever fly back to China early so you can travel to Xinjiang before school starts, either fly all the way to Xinjiang, get a bed on the train, or allow more time to recover from your flight. Take it from me. The second day on the train we passed the town of Jiayuguan in Gansu province and saw this sight.

This is the westernmost fortification on the Great Wall. Considering that we're a long stinkin' way from where the wall starts on the east coast, that's pretty impressive. So on August 12, at 7:30 in the morning, we finally got off that cursed train and found ourselves in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang. I should tell you that more than 90% of China's population is of the Han ethnicity, but Xinjiang is mainly populated by Uighur, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tajik, and other ethnicities from Central Asia. From this point on, all signs were in Chinese and Arabic because all of these languages use the Arabic alphabet.

We have a friend in Shiyan named Orange. She changed her name to Emily last year since everyone teases her about being named Orange, but we all still call her Orange. This is her. She's from Urumqi. She was in Shiyan working at an internship, but we were going to her hometown so she arranged for us to meet up with her mom. Since we were arriving on a Sunday morning, we caught a taxi and went to the local Chinese Church. Most big cities in China actually have a registered church with a big building and everything. It was kind of weird meeting Orange's mom because she doesn't speak English and, for some reason that I still don't understand, Orange exaggerated my Chinese speaking ability in telling her mom that I speak fluent Chinese. So her mom starts talking to us, we're super tired and jetlagged, not to mention the fact that we just spent two nights on a train without showers or anything. At this point I couldn't remember half of my Chinese so we basically just kind of smiled and nodded a lot. Her mom had gotten us our train tickets to Kashgar. The train was scheduled to leave at noon so we really only had about 4 hours off of the train. We stayed for a while at church and then Orange's mom escorted us to the bus stop so we could go back to the station. We got to the station, bought some snacks for the train, which was scheduled to be 23 hours, ate some noodles for lunch, and made our way to the station entrance. At the entrance there was a mob of people pushing to get in the station, but they were being turned away by two ladies with megaphones. I can generally understand people when they speak clearly and slowly here, but there's no way I could understand something being yelled into a bullhorn. I kept hearing our train number being called so I thought that either there's something wrong with our train or they're only letting people on our train into the station to avoid overcrowding. The lady at the door would only wave me away, she wouldn't stop to answer any questions. I still couldn't understand what she was saying into the megaphone. I walked around the corner and showed my ticket to a guard and he finally told me that this train wasn't leaving today, and then he pointed me towards the ticket office. It was a tad bit crowded. Just a tad. Usually the ticket office in a train station is crowded in China, but this time the entire room was one solid mass of people because the crowd of people trying to buy tickets was enlarged by the crowd of people trying to return tickets. If you squint, you might be able to tell that the big marquee on the wall says that all train heading towards Kashgar are canceled due to weather. Since we were on the edge of the desert, I figured maybe there was a sandstorm. Turns out it was a bad rainstorm. Weird, huh? So now there we were, jetlagged, no train, no place to stay, no desire or energy to act. Obviously Angelyn was enjoying the situation more than I was. At this point my phone's battery died so Angelyn messaged Orange to let her know the situation. She then messaged her mom, who said we should come back to the church and meet her. So we did that, then she went back to the station with us to help return the train tickets. Angelyn sat outside with our bags while Li Xinhua and I stood in line for three long hours. I'm pretty sure I fell asleep standing up a few times. After all was said and done, we returned the tickets and managed to get bus tickets instead. The benefit was that instead of another long train ride with only a seat, we now had a 22 hour bus ride with beds. Yay, beds! Glory, glory, hallelujah! We set off on that bus at 5pm. We were leaving 5 hours later than originally planned, but we now had beds, plus I was in the first bed as you got on the bus so I was able to stick my long legs over the edge. If you're wondering what the side effects are from a 34 hour train ride with no bed, take a look at my swollen ankles. Yeesh!



So we set off happily with our pillows and blankets tucked around us. It was still August 12. About 3 hours into the trip the driver pulled over and a few men jumped off the bus to answer the call of nature. Since I'd had entirely too much tea with dinner just before getting on the bus, I jumped off with them. The storm that had cancelled the trains was apparently aproaching because when I got off I was hit with a gust of wind that blew my shoe down the road. I chased it down and came back to the bus to find that everyone else was back on the bus and the driver was honking for me to get on. That tea was going to wait for the next rest stop, so I was a little while longer before getting on the bus. I guess it was too long for the driver. Since the honking didn't get me back on the bus he started driving away slowly. Angelyn had seen me going after my shoe and then couldn't see me anymore so she though I had blown away and that the driver was leaving me. She was relieved when I finally got back on the bus. We stopped again at 10 at a place where we could eat, use the bathroom, and stretch our legs. At this point it's extremely windy, raining slightly, and feels very very cold. I was perplexed. I thought we were going into the desert? We got back on the bus and went back to sleep, taking full advantage of the beds to get over our jetlag. Well, the next morning we woke up and we were still at the same place. What in the world?!? When the clock said 9:50 we got back on the road. We later saw that parts of the road had been covered in water during the night, plus there had been a rockslide blocking one area, so we had just spent 12 hours at the same rest stop. On August 13 we stopped in the middle of no where twice, once for lunch and once to get gas.

Our 22 hour bus ride turned into a 39 hour bus ride. All we could think was "I'm so glad to have a bed." I think the bed made it all okay. The guys beneath us did annoy me by lighting up a new cigarette every 10 minutes. And for breakfast one guy packed some tobacco into the top of an apple, where the stem comes out. Then he rolled up a stiff piece of paper, stuck into the side of the apple, and proceeded to the smoke the apple like a pipe. Never seen that before, and don't know if I should expect to ever see it again. I tried to get a picture but it's extremely blurry because the bus was bouncing. The apple is in the right hand of the man in the red shirt. You can see the long white roll of paper sticking out of it.

We got to Kashgar at 7:3oam on August 14. By this time we had spent four nights in a row on trains and buses and were very ready to shower. Out of the 192 hours since we had left America, we had spent 150 of those on a plane, train, or bus. That's how we got to Kashgar. Considering it's taken me a couple of hours to write all of this and get the pictures to upload, and also considering that I've got to be somewhere across town in 30 minutes, I'm going to end here for now. Two more entries should cover the rest of the trip, I think. I hope you enjoyed the first installment. Tell your friends!