Due to our planning, our most important task on our first day in Ürümqi was to get the train tickets to Chengdu, which is the place the furthest south we can get without having to change trains. Last time I had tried to buy train tickets in China, I almost had had a nervous breakdown and in the end decided to get airplane tickets instead, so I was prepared for the worst. We went to the train station, just to find that it was really busy - Chinese train stations are busy by default, but it gets crazy before public holidays as everybody wants to get back home to celebrate with their families. And of course, our timing was perfect as usual, because the day after was the Chinese mid-autumn festival, one of the four main holidays in China. So we queued for what seemed like an eternity, when we finally reached the counter, I almost got the tickets, but then I mentioned that we have two bikes to carry with us - yes, big bikes. From this point in the conversation on, I was lost. So she sent us to a different counter, to a lady who spoke English. That meant queuing again. And same procedure again - all went fine to the point where I mentioned the bikes - she just said 'You can't take the bikes' and sent us away to yet another different place. We got there and this was apparently the place to drop off goods that you want to send by train. Nobody here spoke a word of English, so it took us a while to figure out that we could actually send our bikes from here the next day and they would go to Chengdu ahead of us, so that we could pick them up there once we arrive. But first of all we had to buy tickets for ourselves, which was not possible here - so back again to the first place. Queuing again and after more than 2 hours in total, we finally had our tickets to Chengdu - a train ride that will take us 49 hours!! As there were no hard sleeper tickets left, we had to go for the luxurious version and bought the more expensive soft sleeper tickets, which we hope will make our journey a bit more comfortable at least.
Now finally after everything was organized we had 2 days left to explore Ürümqi before the train leaves. As you can see on the pictures, we mainly explored the food of Ürümqi. They have great freshly-prepared noodles here, while sitting in the small restaurants enjoying your bowl of noodle soup, you can watch the cook in the kitchen swirling around the pasta dough, preparing the next portion. And as we were here for the mid-autumn festival, we also got our fair share of mooncakes - small pastries with different fillings. We tried many different versions: with red bean paste, with yellow bean paste, with nuts, the traditional version with a kind of almond paste and an eggyolk symbolizing the moon in the middle and so on. All of them yummy and with I don't know how many thousands of calories - but this is the advantage of biking: so many calories are always welcome :)
Apart from that Ürümqi is like any other big Chinese city. We expected to see a lot bigger Uighur community, but apart from the food, you don't see much of it here. We would have loved to get out of Ürümqi and to discover the rest of Xinjiang, but we will have to come back here and do that during a different trip.
