15 May

China

 

Subject: double check
Date: Tue, 15 May 2001 12:32:25

nothing too exciting these last few days. I just met with another english class. The uighurs are crazy for learning english. I'm trying to learn some uighur in exchange but it's pretty daunting. Especially all the arabic letters. This language is better for lefties.

There's a big dawaz fandango happening in kashgar in june. I'm hoping to travel there with some of the local guys. Maybe even the famous adil. I found some funny posters of him today in a bookstore. That and this wierd book with a drawing of a boy looking really queasy on the cover about circumcision. It's all in arabic apart from some scary demonstrational drawings. The ladies at bookstore looked at me pretty wierd when I bought it.

I was walking along the ring road the other day on the outskirts of town in the uighur quarter and found this little green canary walking on the shoulder (everybody uses the freeway here as just another sidewalk, including meandering sheeps and goats and chickens who eat gravel as far as I can tell). I tried to take his picture but he kept moving too much. Then I tried to catch him since he was so tame. But this proved equally unsuccessful. This old uighur guy and his grandson came up and started trying to catch the bird too. Pretty soon about 15 people were milling about trying to catch the little shit. Two guys climbed up on this high brick wall and one guy went up a telephone pole. All to no avail. By this time we had congealed into quite a mass, mostly becuase some of those pedicabs with gravity defying piles of furniture and concrete sacks and floor ties had stopped as well, and the freeway traffic was having to swerve and blare their horns to avoid us all. I gave up. But I felt proud of the dinky bird for causing such a ruckus.