The Ouigur culture

Cell phone story (continued)

I am so tired when I wake up that I even ask dad if it’s ok if I don’t go with him. At first, he hesitates, but finally he asks me to get up. I do it and quickly get ready to leave with dad, Yang Dong and Harkin, whose name means “free” in Ouigour like the “Azad” of my Persian name. I learn that Liu Jia has to do captions for dad and she won’t be coming with us. There’s another problem with dad’s phone. Direction: the bazaar. We enter a small, crowded alleyway where people are laughing and doing business while buying everyday things. Heading towards the second, we enter a small street where thousands of Oriental flavors blend. We buy two kinds of beef raviolis and eat them. It’s our breakfast; it’s so good. Then, dad finds the hats he was looking for. After the Mao hat and the Hui hat, here’s the Ouigour hat. It’s a hat that’s smaller than one’s head and always has embroidery. Each drawing has significance. Mine is green with a square base and white and red drawings that resemble flowers. Dad’s is very similar, it’s just bigger in size. We put our hats on our heads and head to… the telephone repair shop. This telephone story is becoming somewhat of a gag. On a street-corner, behind a glass and in a booth, a young woman in front of a computer and a boy covered in bandages are waiting for us. We go in and dad explains our problem: he can’t read his emails on his Blackberry anymore. The boy takes the phone, has a look at it and gives it back saying that his boss isn’t there and he can’t do anything. We take the phone and go back in the street we were on and I still notice how pretty the girls from Turpan are. In front of the car there’s a store that sells books in Chinese and Ouigour. I bend over them and find a book that could interest dad: it’s a book of love songs with music partitions on the Silk Road. I hand it to him, he looks at it and congratulates me: “you have a good eye” he says to me. I like it when he compliments me. I tell him that it would please Djanan who is a piano master for a 10 year-old. We leave the store and we go from air conditioning to the heat in Turpan, which still remains pleasant. We head towards a kind of Laundromat to drop off our dirty laundry. I wait while they take our things and lean on a wall that turns out not to be a wall at all: it’s a kind of ventilation system with water and I end up with a wet shirt, I wasn’t very happy about that. At least it dries quickly in the heat.