新疆 Day 6 - Into the Mist

We woke up to a gray, drizzling morning. After a discussion at the breakfast table, it was decided that it wasn’t worth going out to see anything because in this weather none of the sights would be very nice. I persuaded my dad to sneak out with me anyway, while everybody else retreated to their rooms. We went a little way out from the hotel to the tourist area where we took some interesting pictures of what looked like the Chinese equivalent of totem poles. We didn’t get very far because the rain came down harder and harder, and my pant legs were slowly getting soaked due to the hem dragging a bit on the ground.

What my dad does on rainy days xD

 



We reconvened at lunchtime after I’d spent the rest of my morning folding paper in my room (a la Chatter at Btowne ;D). Afterwards, we all went for a leisurely ramble around the outskirts of town, but it was rainy and the mountains were all covered with clouds. We went through the tourist area with displays of the local minorities’ cultural stuff. 

the honting ground, the house race track, and the untranslatable.

While walking along the mainly empty roadway, I was literally bored silly (much to my uncle’s intense concern and horror).

WHEE

I paid an old Kazakh man 5RMB to take a picture with his eagle. It was actually massive and extremely heavy. Good thing I’m so TANK ;)

aww yeee.

Soon after that, a thick fog descended upon us like a blanket being drawn up over a bed. Mist fascinated me, because we don’t get much of it in Canada, and I got a few ghostly pictures before hurrying back to the hotel to change into dry clothes again.

 

Dinner was uneventful for the most part. We ate in the same restaurant that we’d had lunch in, it being the only “proper” restaurant in the area. I tried “horse milk wine”, which was a sort of yogurt flavoured white drink that supposedly has similar alcohol content to beer, made from fermented horse’s milk. As we were getting ready to leave, a table full of locals started to sing traditional songs as they passed some kind of intense alcohol around and raised glasses to the elders. That was kind of beautiful.