Craftsmen and Merchants on the Street in Kashgar

We spent most of our first day in Kashgar roaming the streets. The smells, the people and the energy of the place kept our feet moving for hours. 

The Uyghurs call this bread "naan", but it has little in common with the chewy indian bread I know as naan. It's thick, crunchy and dense, a little like a dry, less-buttery deep dish pizza crust. That video of the man making it on the street is one of my favorites from the trip. 

Every city needs an open-air used cell phone market. 

Several men were beating out horseshoes in front of the this forge, at the base of the Old City. I can't imagine for how many centuries this scene has been playing out in this same spot. 

Uyghur men carry knives everywhere, all the time. They used to carry them proudly, in ornately worked sheaths that hung from their belts. Now they conceal them under loose shirts or tuck them into boot tops, because the Chinese frown on the practice. Like so many other conflicts between Uyghur tradition and Chinese law, there are arguments to be made on both sides. 

A man making huge steamer baskets. He's using a heated wheel to slowly bend the wood. You can see the finished product stacked up behind him. Then, a merchant making a sort of corn bread, baked in a tandoor. 

Small, square bread also baked in a tandoor. 

We did stop by an Enternit Cafe, which sadly did not provide internet service. Then, we stopped by an internet cafe, which did. The facilities were a little out of date by our standards, but the room was packed with rows of CRT monitors and kids playing first-person shooters, blasting away. A strangely modern scene just yards from donkey carts and men beating copper bowls. I guess the fact that some kid in Kashgar can frag and bag some American kid in their basement is what Friedman was talking about in "The World is Flat". 

Though the population is heavily Uyghur, there are also Han living in the city, and it's not uncommon to see women in Western clothes and serious shoes tearing through the streets. According to our guide, women with official jobs are restricted from wearing head scarves and are required to wear modern clothes, which sounds like something schools in the US and UK have struggled with. In Kashgar, it means that no one is entirely sure who is a Muslim and who isn't. 

The hand beaten copper bowls were beautiful, and the prices, especially after Ellen had her way with the merchants, were excellent. Lugging two massive copper bowls around for the rest of the trip was a huge pain in the ass. 

These were the only sewing machines we saw all trip. 

The colors and smells of the produce always lure me in. 

However, roadside donkeys, truckloads of sheep, and raw and cured fish just don't smell quite as nice. According to our guide, fish are flown in and stocked in local lakes. We did end up having a tandoori fish for lunch one day, which was incredibly good. 

Oh, and here's an example of some new construction. I know nothing about building, but the contrast between the concrete and the, uh, logs made me scratch my head.