Traveling day seventeen - we leave Bishkek and attempt to eat Western Chinese food

It was really sad to leave Krygyzstan this morning.  We had a wonderful couple of weeks meeting locals, playing with our host family and soaking up the amazing landscapes in Kyrgyzstan.  I and really glad I made the effort to come, and feel like I was in the right place at the right time.  I think to effect change you need to get beside people where they are at, walk with them and have a chat, not stand on the other side of the room and yell 'hey come here'. And I think that's how we worked here talking about alternative communication. There were tiny steps forward, mostly initiated by the children themselves once they could see that their ideas could be understood and valued.  This makes my heart sing.

A pile of resources we left in Krygyzstan to be used by the NGOs to help kids communicate!

sad to leave....

 Once we had landed in Urunqi (after another amazing flight over the Tien Shen mountain range), we needed to go and find some dinner.  We knew no Chinese, so we thought we would wander around until we found a cafe with pictures on the menu.  I had kind of forgotten that Western Chinese food is extremely spicy.  We realized in retrospect that we should have asked our hotel to write the characters for 'no chillies'. One of the dishes we randomly pointed to was inedibly spicy, and we had to leave it. We worked out what meat was in the dishes by me making animal noises at the waitress (fellow patrons were laughing at my lamb and chicken impressions).

eating spicy Western Chinese food

We had to have a post dinner ice cream to settle our tongue and lips down after being put on fire.

Tomorrow we will explore Urumqi in the morning, then it is off to Xian to see the Warriors.

Onwards.