On a People’s Train from Urumqi to Beijing Matt Gross Street-food stalls in Urumqi.
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In my case, the ticket clerk meant it literally: Tickets for tomorrow’s T70 train to Beijing from Urumqi, the capital of China’s far western Xinjiang province, were sold out. No seats, no sleepers — nothing was available for four days. My only option for tomorrow, she explained (with the help of my taxi driver, whose elementary English complemented my elementary Chinese), was to buy a hard seat on the 52-hour ride ... to Shanghai.
I hung my head and covered my face with my hands. What had I gotten myself into? I had flown in from Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, only an hour before, on a $199 fixed-fare China Southern Airways flight, and did not particularly want to stick around Urumqi. After two and a half months of racing across the globe, the end was dangerously close. If I got stuck in Urumqi, I might miss Beijing, Shanghai or even my flight to San Francisco. I could have flown to Beijing for an extra $75, but I longed for the 48-hour train ride there, on which I hoped to get a people’s-eye view of life in the People’s Republic. 1604英语
As I fretted, however, help arrived in the form of Huo, a blue-uniformed security guard who overheard my plight and, apparently out of sympathy, offered to sell me his own ticket — a hard sleeper, the second highest and most popular class — for face value: 631 yuan (about $80 at 7.9 yuan to the dollar). Worried it might be a scam, I flipped through my indispensable Langenscheidt dictionary and asked the clerk if the peach-colored ticket was “legitimate.” It was, she said. The next day at 2:19 p.m., I would begin my journey to the capital.
But first, Urumqi. After checking into the grand but soulless Kunlun Hotel (51 North Youhao Road, 86-991-440-411; 320 yuan), I made for the spanking-new Museum of Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (25 yuan), which details the province’s role in the Silk Road trading system and its gradual rise as an “Inalienable Component of the Great Motherland.” The museum struck me more as a propaganda machine designed to gloss over the repression of the local Muslim Uighur populace by the ethnic Han Chinese. mmkey.net
From there I wandered modern Urumqi, a sprawling grid of skyscrapers and highways that China wants to make its gateway to Central Asia and the Middle East. Cranes loom over building sites, the streets are abuzz with traffic and people, Arabic script crowns street signs, and both the Sheraton and Kempinski hotel chains are opening in the near future.
Though readers dismissed Urumqi as just another big Chinese burg, I found it stimulating after sleepy Bishkek. As night fell, crowds bustled around the food stalls outside the shopping malls on Youhao Road, gnawing goat kebabs (1 yuan apiece) and picking through platters of crayfish in a place that is farther from the ocean than just about any other city on earth.
At another market in the Uighur part of town, the mood was more somber but the food just as exciting. I tucked into deliciously gamy roast lamb (60 yuan per kilo) served with naan bread, then watched a weird scene involving a stolen computer, a repentant thief and a drunken cop — which ended with my running for the highway and grabbing the first taxi I saw (base fare: 6 yuan). I needed a drink myself, so I went to Fubar (1 Gongyuan North Road, 86-991-584-4498), a dim, friendly saloon run by Western expatriates, where I met a European businessman working on the Sheraton project. Why build a Sheraton in Urumqi? MMKEY文摘
“Honest to God,” he said, “I have no idea.”
Neither did I. While fun for one night of random encounters, Urumqi had little else to offer. The next day, I boarded th
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