Urumqi night market and Heaven lake

There are many words in Chinese that don’t have a good direct translation into English. “Renao” is one of them. Breaking the word up into its two sylables, renao says "hot noisy". My textbook says it means “prosperous”, but that’s a poor translation. Renao describes liveliness, a sort of energy in the air that gets people excited. I think Roy described it best when he said the closest English equivalent would be “bumpin’”. A baseball stadium in the bottom of the ninth with the bases loaded is renao. The stock market floor on Wall Street is renao. A packed frat party is renao. The night market in Urumqi is renao.

You can feel it from a block away, looking at the smoke rising through the Christmas lights and Chinese lanterns that light the street. People everywhere are laughing, yelling, and haggling. Vendors cook food out of their carts on the street, selling nan (another regional specialty, a sort of fried circular bread, very delicious), and proudly displaying goats and lambs cooked whole (sometimes with a red bow on their head to make them extra appetizing). Men run around with platters of cantelope slices, yelling like peanut sellers at a ball game: “aaaayyyyyGuaGuaGuaGuaGuaGua!” All the food looks, smells, and tastes delicious: homemade yogurt, fresh roasted chestnuts, pomegranate juice, dumplings, nan bread, fried rice, Muslim noodles, lamb kabobs, and dozens of different varieties of fruit. Like the Uygur population that inhabits the city, Urumqi is a mix of every culture in Asia, and they all come together at the night market.

I didn’t have my camera with me either time we went to the night market, so you’ll just have to use your imagination. It’ll probably paint a better picture than my camera could capture anyway.

I did, however, have my camera when we went to Heaven Lake Wednesday morning. It’s like Lake Tear in the Clouds (for those of you who have hiked the Adirondacks), but multiplied by a factor of about a hundred. I’ll let the picture describe this one.

Now I hate to ruin it for you, but I feel that I must once again remind you of the incredible ability of the Chinese to take a place that could be so perfect and grand and silent on its own, and fill it with tourists, noise, and megaphones. It took me twenty minutes walking along the lake to get around a bend in the shoreline and out of the noise. It was worth it though.

On my way back, as I was hiking along the water, a man on a horse yelled to me from the grassy hill above. I looked up, and he motioned for me to go to him. Figuring it must be a park ranger or something, and that maybe it was another unposted rule that you had to walk on the road that ran along the lake, I walked up the hill to him. A few minutes and 100 feet of elevation later, I reached the road, and started walking back on it. The man called me again. I looked back at him, and he motioned for me still to come over.

“Shenme?” I asked (Chinese for “what?”).
“Qi ma.”
“Huh?”
“Ride horse.”
“…ahhh you bastard… Bu yao.”

I turned and walked back down the slope to the water’s edge. The guy had made me hike several minutes up a steep hill, just to ask if I wanted a horseback ride.

In the afternoon, we went to a Silk Road museum. Yawn. But another trip to the night market in the evening made it worthwhile.