XinJiang - Town, Not Province

It wasn't easy convincing the Chinese in Xi'an that this town existed, but I finally found a bus. Everyone thought I meant the province XinJiang. Only in China is a city of more than 300,000 people unworthy to be considered existent.

I made the trip out to the "countryside" to visit a couple Irish lads I met on the horrid bus from Vientiane to Kunming. They got on at Vang Vieng in a state of near-fatal hangover, which is probably the only way the bus ride could have been worse. I think we bonded in shared misery.

I stayed at Mike's place, a large apartment in a teacher's building on the enormous school compound. It overlooked the exercise yard, and every morning the children stomped around the yard in formation, classes forming phalanxes, chanting and yelling like good little communists.

Mike is an enormous man whose size stopped him from climbing to the top of the town's pagoda, one of two sights in the town. He just wouldn't fit. Patrick is a thoroughly Irish looking man: sandy hair with a wide jaw with a big cleft in his chin. I almost expected him to burst out giggling like a leprechaun at times. I hope that's not racist. The two have been friends since grade school and came to XinJiang to teach together, and have been bearing it impressively for nearly two years.

The town itself is truly unremarkable. It consists of a few long streets branching off each other at right angles, lined with clothing shops, cell phone stores, dumpling shops, an arcade market, fruit vendors, and men sitting on the sidewalk with Industrial Revolution-era sewing machines that Patrick claimed "can fix anything".

There's a bridge going out of town, and a hill with the pagoda Mike nearly got stuck in, and the sorta-Catholic church, the town's other attraction. I say sorta-Catholic because Patrick explained that it's run by the Chinese government who decided to just start sainting people at will. The old Pope wasn't cool with that, and cut them off - across all of China, I'm told - but the Chinese people probably don't know, and if they do, they make no distinctions.

Anyway, it's a lovely church that was built by some Dutch missionaries or something like that. I was related the story of Patrick and Mike's Christmas Eve visit. They strolled up the alley leading to the church to find it swamped with Chinese screaming, spitting, yelling, and shooting off fireworks. Traditional Catholic boys, they left disgusted. I must admit, it's not the sort of Christmas Eve ritual I'd expect either.

Patrick and I got lost in tiny hilltop lanes, edged by high walls of mixed earth and clay. It was a small neighborhood with tall wooden doors and bright red frames. We were trying to make our way to the church via a back route and the quiet maze proved to be far more pleasant than the dusty cement streets and crowds down below. We stumbled into a Buddhist altar where sticks of incense as thick and tall as baseball bats were burning.

Waking up after my first night, Patrick and I went downtown and got roped into the beginning of a day long funeral ceremony. We ate some suspicious and unidentifiable food in a smoky restaurant and excused ourselves. Later, I had dinner in a local canteen with one of the other 5 English teachers, a veteran ex-pat Aussie named Guy who said, "I won't discuss politics in a place like this, you never know who's listening" before he started discussing Chinese politics.

XinJiang was a nice break from the massive cities of China, of which it seems I've seen far too many of. It wasn't the countryside exactly, but I think it was as close to it as I'll get in China.