Day 1: Beijing/Urumqi/Kashgar

There's a lot to tell so I'll just take it one day at a time.

The first day of our trip was Friday, April something-or-other. I'm not very good at dates. I had been up packing and getting ready, bringing my bicycle into my room so it wouldn't get stolen over break, etc. until the wee hours of the morning, so I got maybe 1 or 2 hours of sleep before waking up at 5 to leave for the airport. It's about an hour's taxi ride, and our plane was at 7:45. Gross. We were lucky to find a taxi on campus, although we felt bad to wake up the driver, who was asleep in the backseat. It wasn't too bad that it was so early because we all just slept through the entire plane ride to Urumqi. We were only going to Urumqi to transfer because there aren't direct flights from Beijing to Kashgar, but it ended up that we had an 8-hour layover in Urumqi. Fun times, right? Well, it was actually kind of nice, because the travel agency we booked through gave us a tour guide (henceforth I shall use the Chinese word for tour guide, daoyou, because that's what I call them in my head) and we went out and did some stuff in Urumqi. This was a bit of a false first impression of our trip, because later the travel agency pulled some shenanigans on us, and various other unfortunate things happened, but I'll explain that as it comes. I went with my 2 American friends, Richard and Casey, and the first day it was just the 3 of us with our daoyou, who was the most adorable ever. He was young and really nice and his English name was Zero. He took us to lunch, where he ordered us a traditional Xinjiang dish called zhuafan, which is rice and vegetables stir-fried in lamb fat with a nice hunk of lamb on top. They are all about the lamb (yangrou) in Xinjiang, especially because the Uyghurs are Muslims and therefore don't eat China's usual ubiquitous meat, pork. It was really good, and totally got us psyched up for Xinjiang food.
Besides lunch, our daoyou also took us to this bazaar, where Casey and I bought pretty pashminas and Richard bought overpriced raisins (30 kuai for only 1 jin! I know you have no concept of that but it's a lot, even though they were excellent raisins) and we made fun of him. Our daoyou, nice as he was, was kind of no help. He kept being like "well this is pretty good stuff so I guess it should be a little expensive," which when you're trying to bargain is not exactly useful. I went off on my own and got stared at like mad and made friends with some scarf-selling ladies. I was looking for a scarf to cover my hair, and I tried on a couple and was leaning towards the green one, but the ladies were like no no no and seriously MADE me get the red one instead because it "looked better with my white skin." This is kind of a common theme in my clothes-shopping experiences here.
It's not really related to anything, but that afternoon we were waiting at the bazaar with all our luggage for our car to come, and I was sitting on my suitcase and I was so tired that I fell asleep sitting up on my suitcase in the Uyghur bazaar and everybody stared at me. Casey has a picture of this, which I'll post whenever I get pictures from her.
In the evening we went back to the good ol' airport to fly to Kashgar. Our flight was pretty late, and we didn't actually arrive in Kashgar until almost midnight. Here's where the fun starts.
So our deal with the travel agency was that any time they had to pick us up, there would be a daoyou waiting at the plane/train station with a sign with Casey's name on it. This worked fine mostly, except when we got to Kashgar there was only one person waiting for a sign, and it wasn't the LEE CASEYMARIA that we got so used to looking for. Heheh. This is a little more representative of the bulk of our trip experience. We went outside the airport, which was the teeniest little airport ever (it had one luggage conveyor belt and like two rooms, and that was it), and waited for a daoyou, but no daoyou came. A lot of slightly sketchy taxi drivers came up and asked us if we needed rides, but we declined and told them our daoyou was coming. In the end, we had to call our Urumqi daoyou and ask him to help us get in touch with the Kashgar daoyou because we didn't have any contact info. I'm pretty sure the Kashgar daoyou had just forgotten about us, but she apologized profusely and said she'd be there quickly. Ha. At this point, the airport had closed, all the airport employees had left, and they turned out the lights. The sketchy cab drivers, however, were still there. After a while most of them finally accepted that we didn't want a cab and left, but there was still one cabbie waiting at the bottom of the steps, watching us in the dark. Nice. Around maybe 1 am or so, our daoyou finally arrived, delivering some convoluted excuse and then whisking us off to our hotel, where we finally got to rest for real. And that was the first day.

Day 2: long van rides in the desert, amazing mountains, and an unfortunate miscommunication. Prepare yourself.