Eating in Urumqi

Buns and fruit are becoming a regular routine for us here in Urumqi. In Beijing we found that the restaurants often had English words, or had pictures of their food on display, thus allowing us to point to what we wanted. In Urumqi, you see very little English, they just don't get the tourists here. It is interesting to note that almost all signs are in Mandarin, Arabic and sometimes a third language (don't know what it is). You know you are in a foreign country when the signs are bilingual or trilingual and you still can't understand them.

Anyway, when we don't have a guide with us, which is at least one meal a day, we have to make do. While we are brave in what we will try, there's a vast difference between intentionally ordering snake, ox gonads, or cricket salad, and pointing to a line of Arabic or simplified Chinese on a menu and getting goodness-knows-what.

Breakfast is a buffet at the hotel, so that is easy to do. They have some of the traditional 'Western' breakfast foods: breads, cereal, eggs, bacon etc. There are also several decidedly non traditional breakfast foods: steamed buns, noodles, cucumber juice, stir-fried vegies and pasta with Italian sauce. Kayla says she doesn't care if she is eating spaghetti for breakfast, it is familiar food and it tastes good!

Tonight we took a walk and found a really interesting market area with lots of food vendors, and a fruit and meat market. We bought peaches, lychee fruit, flat bread, cakes, tiny puff pastries (think Schmidt's mini cream puff with apricot filling), roasted pistachios and drinks. Some, ok all, of the hanging meat was too intimidating for us to venture buying meat-on-a-stick. However, Kayla's reaction to the piles of pig tails, pig ears, livers, tripe, tongue and the like was amusing to us, and to the locals! Kayla and Dan agreed that they didn't want to think about what was squishing under their flip-flops in the dark interior of the fruit and meat market.

We weren't able to find a bench to sit on, so we sat on the curb. Culturally that was not all that strange a thing to do and we didn't meet with any disapproval from the locals. All the food was great...they have some wonderful bakers here. The cake we bought was some kind of spice cake, like gingerbread, but subtly spiced. We couldn't figure out what spice it was, but it was good.

It was funny seeing GangGang show a preference for some of his foods, and work with us to communicate what he wanted to eat next from the smörgåsbord. Watermelon was a big hit, until he discovered pistachios. He was eating them as quickly as Dan could shell them, until we figured out he could shell them on his own. We finally had to cut him off after about 50 pistachios.