The train towards Xi'an and Mongolia

Last day with our chinese friends

We spend the day today in the train. Dad has no reason to wake me up at the crack of dawn so he lets me sleep. When I wake up, it’s 10 am and I slept for 10 hours! What a luxury! I needed it. Looking around me I see no one in the compartment. I look out the window and see that the train has stopped at a station. I figure that I probably woke up from the screeching brakes. I hear fruit and juice vendors that stroll around the train stations. They shout to sell their products. I wonder, since dad loves everything that’s fresh, if he didn’t go on the platform to buy some fruit. I climb down from the top bunk. At that moment, dad arrives with fruit and says to me: “Well, you’ve slept well.” The fruit that dad likes the most has roughly the same shape as a pear and is yellow. It’s called “the fruit of long life.” It’s a juicy and thick-skinned fruit without pits. But dad says that he has it more for its taste than its name. As for me, I really do hope that he will have it, “the long life.” I eat one but I don’t like it at all. It tastes so awful that it makes me want to vomit. Then Liu Jia takes out hazelnuts form her bag and hands me a nutcracker to open them: they provide a nutcracker in the bag. Dad and I love these hazelnuts. They’re larger, less fatty and crunchier than the ones we find in France. I climb back on my bed and listen to music while writing my texts. I love listening to music. I listen to Jacques Brel but also to Mika or the rapper Soprano. What I like the most in style of music is Rap: there’s rhythm, the lyrics express a desire to express oneself and to revolt against the workings of today’s society. And that’s good. I also listen to some American Rap. One of my best friends, Sam, does Rap and I listened to what he does. I think that he’s a real artist and with other friends, like Davy, if they form a group they could do something really good. I also listen to a Persian music group called Black Cats. It’s an Iranian group. Not everyone knows it, so I’m going to talk to you about it. It’s an Iranian Pop/Rap band that have very nice love lyrics, but also in other domains with a very good rhythm. The songs are sung by a friend of mine named Kamyar. Basically, he’s one of my cousin Aydin’s best friends and they grew up together. I met him and now we get along really well, but since he lives in Los Angeles I don’t get to see him very often. Kamyar’s a cool guy. The funny thing is both he and Aydin are into music, but two totally different styles: Aydin does traditional music while Kamyar is into modern music. But Kamyar considers Aydin a master of music. They were both part of a group three good friends. The third is called Parsa and ten years later they’re still best friends in the whole world. That’s what fascinates me about friendship. I like all three like big brothers. They each have a different character. Every time I talk to them, I learn something new. After two hours of writing my texts and listening to music, my battery runs out and my text is finished. So I shut everything off and sit in front of the window to watch the landscape. The window curtain represents nomads on the Silk Road with their walking camels and since the train moves forward, we have the impression that they’re also moving forward and can imagine many stories. We get the impression that they’re going up and down the mountains, crossing deserts and stopping in cities when the train stops. What’s funny is that we’re doing a journey by train, on the Silk Road and in the train the curtain’s motifs illustrate well our trip. It fascinates dad. The landscapes repeat themselves. I climb down and listen to music with Liu Jia. Actually, since she has a French song on her computer, I play it and ask her to sing. Her accent makes me laugh and makes dad laugh too. After, we listen to it a second time and I explain her mistakes and the third time it’s perfect. I also see that she has the entire movie “Les Choristes” on her computer. I find that funny and watch it a bit. I start to get hungry and go to the dining car to buy a box with noodles inside, mini pieces of meat and powdered pepper. It’s a soup packet that you add hot water to. Without knowing that it’s hot pepper powder, I put all of it in my bowl and when I go to drink the broth I find it too spicy. When I finish my soup, it’s around 11pm and we have to get off because we’re arriving in Xi’an. We get off the train and since we have a lot of luggage, a porter helps us.

All day long on a train

Leaving Eastern Turkestan

We spend the day today in the train. Dad has no reason to wake me up at the crack of dawn so he lets me sleep. When I wake up, it’s 10 am and I slept for 10 hours! What a luxury! I needed it. Looking around me I see no one in the compartment. I look out the window and see that the train has stopped at a station. I figure that I probably woke up from the screeching brakes. I hear fruit and juice vendors that stroll around the train stations. They shout to sell their products. I wonder, since dad loves everything that’s fresh, if he didn’t go on the platform to buy some fruit. I climb down from the top bunk. At that moment, dad arrives with fruit and says to me: “Well, you’ve slept well.” The fruit that dad likes the most has roughly the same shape as a pear and is yellow. It’s called “the fruit of long life.” It’s a juicy and thick-skinned fruit without pits. But dad says that he has it more for its taste than its name. As for me, I really do hope that he will have it, “the long life.” I eat one but I don’t like it at all. It tastes so awful that it makes me want to vomit. Then Liu Jia takes out hazelnuts form her bag and hands me a nutcracker to open them: they provide a nutcracker in the bag. Dad and I love these hazelnuts. They’re larger, less fatty and crunchier than the ones we find in France. I climb back on my bed and listen to music while writing my texts. I love listening to music. I listen to Jacques Brel but also to Mika or the rapper Soprano. What I like the most in style of music is Rap: there’s rhythm, the lyrics express a desire to express oneself and to revolt against the workings of today’s society. And that’s good. I also listen to some American Rap. One of my best friends, Sam, does Rap and I listened to what he does. I think that he’s a real artist and with other friends, like Davy, if they form a group they could do something really good. I also listen to a Persian music group called Black Cats. It’s an Iranian group. Not everyone knows it, so I’m going to talk to you about it. It’s an Iranian Pop/Rap band that have very nice love lyrics, but also in other domains with a very good rhythm. The songs are sung by a friend of mine named Kamyar. Basically, he’s one of my cousin Aydin’s best friends and they grew up together. I met him and now we get along really well, but since he lives in Los Angeles I don’t get to see him very often. Kamyar’s a cool guy. The funny thing is both he and Aydin are into music, but two totally different styles: Aydin does traditional music while Kamyar is into modern music. But Kamyar considers Aydin a master of music. They were both part of a group three good friends. The third is called Parsa and ten years later they’re still best friends in the whole world. That’s what fascinates me about friendship. I like all three like big brothers. They each have a different character. Every time I talk to them, I learn something new. After two hours of writing my texts and listening to music, my battery runs out and my text is finished. So I shut everything off and sit in front of the window to watch the landscape. The window curtain represents nomads on the Silk Road with their walking camels and since the train moves forward, we have the impression that they’re also moving forward and can imagine many stories. We get the impression that they’re going up and down the mountains, crossing deserts and stopping in cities when the train stops. What’s funny is that we’re doing a journey by train, on the Silk Road and in the train the curtain’s motifs illustrate well our trip. It fascinates dad. The landscapes repeat themselves. I climb down and listen to music with Liu Jia. Actually, since she has a French song on her computer, I play it and ask her to sing. Her accent makes me laugh and makes dad laugh too. After, we listen to it a second time and I explain her mistakes and the third time it’s perfect. I also see that she has the entire movie “Les Choristes” on her computer. I find that funny and watch it a bit. I start to get hungry and go to the dining car to buy a box with noodles inside, mini pieces of meat and powdered pepper. It’s a soup packet that you add hot water to. Without knowing that it’s hot pepper powder, I put all of it in my bowl and when I go to drink the broth I find it too spicy. When I finish my soup, it’s around 11pm and we have to get off because we’re arriving in Xi’an. We get off the train and since we have a lot of luggage, a porter helps us. We arrive downstairs with Liu Jia but dad and Yang Dong stayed on the platform to take photos and film. After fifteen minutes, they come down and we head towards the exit. We arrive in front of the train station. There, it’s as though there’s a tsunami of taxi drivers that want to swallow us. Finally, we go into a taxi and for the first time it’s a woman driver. After five minutes we arrive in front of the hotel and dad asks the taxi driver to pick us up in the morning at 10:30 to take us to the airport. We check in for the night and ask if there’s Internet. As an answer, they give us a small box that contains connecting wires. We go to the room and I ask dad if I can go online. He says yes. A half hour later he decides to go downstairs to take pictures and asks me to go to bed. But before going to bed, I check to see who is connected to MSN and there I see my cousin Tchekad who is a year older than me. I’m glad to be talking to him because on top of being my cousin, he’s also one of my best friends. I chat, and chat, and am still chatting with him when dad comes back and since he sees me still in front of Internet, he’s not happy and asks me to turn it off. Since I have to, I say goodbye to Tchekad and go to bed.

Animated discussions

On skin color

Waking up, I find myself in front of a small hotel Liu Jia had reserved for three o’clock a few meters away from the train station so that we could shower and prepare our long journey by train. I shower and since I’m really hungry dad asks Yang Dong and Liu Jia to have dinner with me while he stays in the hotel to recharge all the batteries, phones, computers and cameras, like he does every night. During dinner we talk with the waitress. She has tanned skin like the Ouigour; I ask her if she is one and she answers that she’s from Sichuan. So I ask Liu Jia if all the women from Sichuan are tanned, and she answers: “No, they’re beautiful”. Since I don’t understand the link between “dark skinned” and “ugly”, I ask her what she means by that. She tells me that for her, the white skinned are beautiful and not the dark skinned. Since I’m more tanned than she is, it comes across as a racist insult and I tell her angrily that in France, the price is high for a comment like that. Then, to justify herself she says that I didn’t understand her, that in China one prefers to be white and go out with a tanned man because that means he works hard. If we read between the lines, it means the same thing, but I pretend to accept what she says. I still tell her that if she says that in France she’ll have to pay a lot of money and without understanding the message, she thanks me.

When the moon meets the sun

Eclipse and other happy stories

I keep playing basketball until the moment we see a large black car arriving out of which emerge two men. They both have an American baseball cap and one is Ouigour while the other is Chinese. They both have a big belly and on their wrists, time is shown on two luxury watches. I don’t know who they are but judging how the officers act around them, I understand that they’re high profile officers in the department. After a half-hour consultation together, they decide to keep our passports. They authorize us to go see the eclipse but only with a two-car police escort. Finally we go. The driver takes a sandy road that goes up and down and we follow the others towards a hill where the view of the eclipse will be magnificent because there are no trees to hide the view and the clouds don’t hide the sun. The first thing we do with dad when coming out of the car is to think about a solution to the second question. We don’t find one until dad sees in the young Venezuelan (Monika) girl’s hands pieces of black glass especially made for the eclipse. He asks her if he could have one. She accepts. He tries it on the camera directing it towards the sun and it works. We found the glass but dad doesn’t have any scotch-tape, so he goes around to each car asking if anyone happens to have some. Finally, he finds some and comes towards me putting scotch-tape around the glass to watch the eclipse. I bring the camera and tripod up the hill and place it in a good spot to film the eclipse. Meanwhile, Alex and Ruth bring up the food, drinks and chairs. I help them. When we’re up on the hill, I talk with Monika and find out that she is indeed Venezuelan. She’s 19 years old and after China she’s going to Eastern Europe and then to Paris to see the Coldplay concert, a well-known Rock band. I tell her to call me before coming to Paris and maybe I could find someone she could stay with. Meanwhile her mother, complaining of stomach cramps, asks for advice about medicine. At one point, we see through our glasses the Moon give a light kiss on the Sun’s cheek. Everyone is happy and I check to see in the camera that everything works well. Then, the moon does more than give a light kiss and I go up higher on the mountain behind the hill to join our Texan friend. When I arrived to the top, I don’t find him so I climb back down. Looking at the Sun, I see that Mrs. Moon is very naughty and covers half of Mr. Sun’s body. How sweet is love! After a few minutes, there’s only a small space for mister Sun to breathe and eventually, he can’t breathe at all. It’s a moment of pure joy and everyone is happy. As for me, I run towards the camera and pull off the black piece of glass and the infrared that turned itself on when I removed the scotch-tape. It’s dark, which is extraordinary, it’s the moon that covers the sun and we can see a giant glimmer of light that is the sun, blocked by the small moon. It gives a very nice color to the moon. I then learn that while the moon was embracing the sun, Alex asked his girlfriend to marry him and she said yes, and those are the beautiful moments in life. I congratulate him and he asks me how to say “I Love You” in French, I answer him and he repeats it to his future wife. The eclipse over, I run to put the black glass back on the camera since the same thing as before is going to happen, but no one seems interested anymore. Dad comes to see me and says that he found it extraordinary. I’m happy for him. What I find beautiful in life is that every day we can see something new. Oh yes, dad for example had to wait 56 years to see an eclipse. The people from the next village came with babies, grandmothers and everyone to watch the eclipse. For protection, they brought old X-rays from the doctor’s, but when they saw there was a protection on the camera, they all looked in the camera, which was funny. Then the three Texans arrive and they also thought it was extraordinary. Since one of them, Beau, studied French and wants to practice it, I ask him in French what he thought of the eclipse and if he wants to see another one. He answers that he loved it and he wants to see the next one, and again the next one, and the one after that, etc. While talking with him, I learn that after China, with his two friends, they’ll go to Thailand, Malaysia, and then Indonesia, and after they’ll go back to Texas. He tells me that if ever I come to Texas I can be sure to have a place to stay and in return I jokingly say that if ever he comes to Paris, I’ll rent him Versailles. He laughs and thanks me. I ask for everyone’s email address before leaving. We then return to the police station to get our passports back and wait a little. Meanwhile, I ask Beau what is his dream job. He tells me he wants to be a lawyer and he had applied to Harvard. I tell him that I’ll pray that he gets in. After, they give us our passports and we leave with the mini-bus. On the road, I stick my head out in the wind but I bring it back in quickly because the wind is as painful as the sun for the eyes. Since I have nothing to do and I’m tired, I fall asleep.

A game of basketball at the police station

Strange encounters

They need a precise map and I run to go get mine but I remember that I forgot it on the bed in the hotel room. He tells me where he put it and I go get it. I bring it to Alex the Australian who along with Ruth, the man I spoke to this morning’s son, will try to find a better place to watch the eclipse. In this city, the trees and clouds aren’t on our side. Alex sees that I’m struggling to find a solution to watch the eclipse without damaging my eyes. He proposes giving me black and white films to watch the eclipse through. But Ruth’s mother who is worried about our eyes gives us special glasses for the eclipse. I thank her and figure that’s one problem solved. Meanwhile dad, used to talking to everyone, stays alone in a corner and puts his head in his hands. I’m used to these moments of meditation, I’m not worried and I keep talking with the others. After a while, I notice a basketball ball rolling on the court that belongs to the police station and that is located in the station’s large yard. Jumping with joy, I join the three Texans to play. I take the ball, shoot and miss, then pass it to another and he misses, then he passes again to a young and rather strong blonde Texan who plays on his university’s rugby team. Giving the ball back to me, he passes it like he would in rugby. I get behind the three-point line and I dribble for a long time, shoot and score a basket; that makes three points but since we’re not actually doing a match it doesn’t count. The British who played with us but kept missing decides to leave us. We end up being four players and play a half-court game. Under a harsh sun and sweat dripping from my body, I play, run and try to get the ball but my adversaries are very strong and twice my size. I’m happy because I love playing basketball. Finally we lose 10 to 5 and I scored 2 of the 5 points for my team, I’m happy. We stop playing and freshen up. It’s a kind of half-time. Meanwhile, I call my grandparents and tell them that the police stopped us, that we’re in a police station and waiting but I reassure them by saying we were able to eat and that we’re even playing basketball. My grandfather says laughing: “life is beautiful” and my grandmother asks me if I slept there. I tell her no. I’m glad to have them on the phone because I miss them a lot. After playing basketball for an hour, I see two women arriving, a mother and a daughter that are dressed as though they were coming from a beach in Saint-Tropez. The mother has a very fancy handbag. When they arrive, we tell them jokingly that they’re late! With their accent in English, I wonder if they’re not from a Spanish-speaking country. Since the mother has a T-shirt with “Venezuela” written on it, I wonder if they’re not Venezuelan. They are being questioned. Everyone is ready, but the village’s police chief tells us he can’t do anything for us and has to wait for the chiefs from the prefecture in Kurul.

A few hours at the police station

Nice encounters and unpleasant questionning


After an hour I wake up in a police station. Coming out of the mini-bus, I bump into the American man I met earlier, who is part of a group composed of his wife, their son and also of an Australian and his girlfriend from the Philippines who live in Lanzhou, and finally, an Irish woman with her British husband and their two daughters who are 5 and 8 years-old and also live in Lanzhou. I ask dad what’s going on and he tells me that we were stopped by a police control. They took our passports and are waiting for their boss to ask us questions. At the same time, I see a taxi arrive with three Texans that are philosophy students at the University of Texas. They are like us, in police custody. Of course, I ask them if they’re going to vote and all three answer: “yes and for Obama”. For me, that’s the right candidate. Today, my dream is to have an hour alone with Barack Obama; I could even go to Chicago to meet him if he accepts. An hour later, dad calls me and tells me that the bosses are here and the police officers know which questions to ask us. We walk through a corridor that looks like a mini corridor of death since we’re really scared of the outcome of these events. We arrive in a small room that looks like an interrogatory room in a Parisian police station. In the middle of this room, there’s a table around which are waiting a woman who speaks bad English and two police officers. They look at our passports and ask us routine questions that all the police officers on the planet ask. That is, from what I know from watching interrogatories in different police shows on television. The questions are random, the reason why we’re in China, the date we entered the territory and our departure date. While observing the room, I see behind the police officers a mini photo studio. Oh no, that’s not to have a picture taken in front of a monument or with celebrities. It’s to leave a good souvenir for these police gentlemen. The interrogatory over, two questions come up: the first being how will we find glasses for the eclipse, and second being how are we going to protect the camera from the eclipse (since we haven’t received an answer from the National Geographic)? We figure that we’ll have better chances of finding an answer on a full stomach. That’s when we see two Japanese dressed like adventurers arriving at the station drenched, as though they swam here. When we tell them we’re hungry, the police officers tell us we can go eat but only if accompanied by an officer who will watch us during the entire meal. We find a restaurant with separate rooms for each group of tourists. They give us one. Fifteen minutes later, the two Japanese arrive after having dried off and being questioned. I learn that having seen a checkpoint on the road, they asked their driver to go into the village alone and they tried to go around the police by swimming in the river in order to meet up with the driver in the village, but police officers dressed in civilian clothing stopped them. These Japanese are real troopers! During the meal, we cut the melon and when everyone has eaten well, I offer some to two groups next to us and they thank me. While eating, dad asks me to stop talking because apparently I talk too much and he doesn’t like it when we talk at the table, but that gets on my nerves. During the entire meal dad, who hates talking at the table, has to answer the police officer’s questions. The policeman, who is Ouigour, therefore Muslim, tells dad: “hurry up, it’s prayer time”. We go and dad understands that it’s to have more information about him, rather than a real call to prayer. He answers saying that he doesn’t do it. When we are finished lunch, we return with the police officer to the police station. The two questions are still not resolved. At the station, I talk with a group of foreigners kept at the station.

On the road to the Eclipse

A chaothic departure

Today I wake up with the joy of discovering something new, since today we are going to see an eclipse. According to scientific research I did over the Internet, the best place to see it is in Yiwu, a small city North-East of Kumul (Hami) in Oriental Turkistan. The Chinese authorities took advantage of the eclipse to set up a toll and have millions of tourists going to see the eclipse pay. The cost of the authorization is too expensive for us: 320 euros or 3200 Yuan. With dad, we figure that an eclipse is visible not only in one place and that the band of vision is wide and long. Looking at the map and on Internet, we notice that the eclipse is also visible from another small village. Dad calls the minibus driver he hired the day before and tells him where we decided to go. When we are finished putting our things away, we go have breakfast. I don’t know why, but today for breakfast I take only a hard-boiled egg and some Chinese bread. Yet, dad says that while traveling it’s always better to eat well when there’s the opportunity to, because we never know what might happen. When we finish, we put our things in the mini-bus that’s being driven by a fat man that always scratches himself and who’s called Karam. Coming out of the hotel, I see a robust man of about 65 years old who limps and has a four-day old beard. I talk with him and with his accent, fast-talking but more distinct than a British, I understand that he’s American. He tells me that he lives in Beijing. He came with his wife. She’s about the same age as him with white hair. She has the real attitude of a grandmother: she’s considerate of everything and everyone. Her son, in his thirties, speaks very good Chinese. They also came to see the eclipse. He’s very nice and before leaving, he looks at our license plate. He’s going to Xincheng like us and says that if we cross paths on the road and we’re in trouble, he’ll come and help us. Then he leaves. And so do we, in our mini-bus. But after five minutes, dad remembers that we have to prepare our train departure between Hami an Xi’an that will last more than 23 hours, just after the eclipse. He asks Liu Jia if she found a solution to buy the train tickets. She says no, but guarantees that we’ll be able to buy them in the evening when we return. Dad says that Xi’an, a popular tourist destination, will most likely be the next destination for the thousands of tourists that came to watch the eclipse. That’s dad’s experience as a traveler talking! He asks Liu Jia to find a solution now for the tickets or to have someone else buy them, but she has none. At that moment, our Indian traveling companion proposes that we go to a travel agency and have them buy the tickets for us. Dad says that it’s Liu Jia’s job to take care of these things, to take the weight off his shoulders in organizing this trip. I think he’s right and with everything he’s done for me, for the trip and for his Paris office and also for his association called Aina in Kabul, he has a lot of weight to carry, and to remove one means a lot. We then go to Hami’s big hotel where there’s a travel agency. We arrive in a small crowded room where a woman is typing information into a computer and another who has to sell the last six authorization tickets for the eclipse and had promised to sell them to ten people. Languages are mixed in this crowd: we hear Australian, British, American and even Chinese being spoken. In the middle of the shouting and stress of the woman selling the authorizations, Liu Jia asks her if she can book out tickets. She writes our train on a piece of paper and accepts. Dad and his genius sees that this poor woman, once the tourists will be gone, will only want to hang her head back, sigh and sleep. Since Liu Jia told me that she doesn’t care about seeing the eclipse, and although he’s sorry about it, dad proposes that she stays to buy the tickets if she doesn’t find another solution. Then, she answers with a sentence that I’ve heard a million times during this trip with her, which is: “It doesn’t matter.” She takes her things from the minibus and leaves. I can hear myself thanking dad and see Yang Dong relieved to finally be able to speak in Liu Jia’s absence, because she doesn’t let others speak and no one dares ask a question for fear of getting an answer in her voice that could blow out an eardrum. The driver starts driving at an odd speed, and we tell ourselves that he’s weird and at this speed, we’ll arrive in the village tomorrow morning, well after the eclipse. After a few minutes, he stops in front of a gas station where cars are lined up waiting to get gas. At that moment, dad protests and asks the driver to not waste his time and to find another gas station. He also asks him to buy Kumul melons that are reputed to be the best in the world. After driving in circles for 10 minutes, we find the melons but no gas. We buy three melons at 5 Yuan. Finally, we find a gas station at the end of a small sandy road and Karam fills up. When the tank is full he begins to drive at a normal speed and then I feel relieved. Then, I sleep while listening to Jacques Brel and think about a journey between Nîmes and Monaco during which I listened to Brel with my grandfather.