Day 427 - Exploring Urumqi and its Uighur population

Early this morning we headed out into the day following Xinjiang time, the unofficial time around here. It was 10am Beijing time, but more like 8am when you're this far west of Beijing, who for some reason choose to ignore such vast land differences and impose the same time on everyone. However we noticed that most people ignore the official time, expect the government run things like banks, and were heading out to work at 10am!

We found Adam some more sunglasses after his original fake Armani ones suffered a young death typical of many made in China products! We then accidentally adlibed our way to a Uighur market full of fruit, meat, and different local handicrafts - a nice change from the normal things at Chinese markets we have been looking at for the last 14 months. We then ended up in the very touristy and not so enjoyable huge "traditional" Erdaoqiao markets, which only held our attention for a few minutes before going to the supermarket and making our way back to the hostel.

After lazing the afternoon away we went to a huge cybermarket passing through the People's Park on the way where we saw a group of black army soldiers who looked like they were following us .... At the market we bought a couple of cheap batteries for our camera in preparation for a month in the mountains in Nepal in a few months time. Oh yeah, Nepal - only an 8 year absence!

We spent the evening back at the hostel hanging out with other travellers and the awesome staff members.

Adlibing the shops of Urumqi