here and there

When cultural differences are mentioned, I always think about the movie Everything is illuminated with Elijah Wood. When they are travelling west, he asks for a potato in a typical Soviet-style canteen and a fat woman is so surprised and angry that somebody doesn’t eat meat. There are such misunderstandings among the representatives of different cultures all the time, but it doesn’t mean they shouldn’t communicate, right? My homeland is so wild and messy, yet beautiful, but sometimes I like to run away from here and check out other places. That’s how I went to Xinjiang, which is an autonomous region in the northwest of China.
It was very strange for me to go travelling to Xinjiang. Firstly, it is a completely unknown culture and language and secondly I didn’t actually plan to go there, the journey happened when we went a bit off the track. We travelled for 32 hours by train and had to change it once again. That’s where I noticed women’s fingernails were partially painted red with something that was surely not nail polish. It was the first thing that attracted me to the Uygur women. I mean I knew they were Uygur and they had their own language, they were Muslim and very different from Chinese, but they never write about these fingernails in books. Another thing was people collecting stones in the river and then selling them – seemed strange to us, but if they enjoy it, let them do it! Then we were sitting in a bar with a Chinese guy. “It is so dangerous here in Xinjiang, he said. A Uygur butcher killed a Chinese guy in the market just because he was unfaithful and touched the meat without buying it.” Women and children hand making carpets, taxi drivers who are so far away from reality they don’t even understand where you need to go. Or maybe it was us who didn’t understand? Maybe “When in Rome do like Romans do?” Maybe under that red fingernail paint there is something much deeper? It is the history of people in the center of the Ancient Silk Road, with the second highest mountain in the world, with the huge desert in the middle. There are people with the desert in their heart here, and there are mountain people and road people , carpet people and grapes people, bazaar people and camel people, there are taxi drivers and government officials, there are even Kazakhs and Kyrgyz, but what unites them all into one unique culture is everything that made them what they are. And it’s not good or bad, it’s just different. Diversity –that’s what makes travelling in an unknown culture so interesting and at the same time a bit dangerous. Diversity.