Tajik wedding
Yesterday Xiefei met a girl on the bus who invited him and me to attend her cousin’s wedding in Tashkurgan. So our destination for the day was this town, about a
We were first taken by a Tagik lorry, later by a Chinese truck, and the final stretch was on a pickup where our bags were hastily stacked on sacks of aubergines in the open back, ready to be whisked off in a fast curve. We put up at a hostel and immediately got in touch with our friend. We were invited to a delicious zhuafan lunch with yak meat in a private house. Then we took a walk to the grassland where quaint wooden gangways were set up over the marshy land.
Tashkurgan looks very Chinese, sporting ridiculous architecture, disproportionately wide boulevards for no traffic at all, and the usual cold feel. However, its soul is not Chinese at all, being the head of the autonomous Tagik prefecture hosting the country’s approximately 50,000 people of this ethnicity.
Reportedly, the official version of history found in schoolbooks is that this district was united to
The wedding started
The next morning in spite of arriving at the bus station as early as possible, the bus tickets were sold out, and we had to share a taxi to Kashgar. My head was all right, but the spirit had burnt the inside of my stomach and I felt very queasy. I skipped lunch, only drank some yogurt and ate a morsel of bread. In town the night market was in full swing again, but I mostly felt alien to an appetite for food. I forced myself to gulp something down to keep going and my eyes tried to spot the most inoffensive-looking food on offer. The spices in those noodles were nevertheless another hard blow to my stomach.