Pre-Registration

So much has happened since my last entry, life seems to have been moving at rocket pace. On Thursday, before Marta arrived, I went to the China Mobile store to see how I could top up my SIM card – turns out it would just be easier to buy another one, change my number and start from scratch. Okay, let’s do it … easier said than done. As well as having to explain everything to me (because I am pernickety and want to be sure I am not making a huge mistake), there was the business of setting up the SIM card, which over here means filling out a lot of documents and having copies of your passport taken; basically, the SIM becomes registered to you, none of this chopping and changing, even for PAYG cards. This is hassle, but there you go. Eventually all the documents were complete (I had to sign about seven different sheets of paper), and I was ready to go – but please do come back to a China Mobile store every time you want to top up (what? not online, or over a counter at a newsagents?) and definitely come back in about two days’ time to add on “Display Caller ID” which is an extra option over here rather than the standard we expect elsewhere. This service costs Y5 per month on top of the contracted amount (see below), and the assistant didn’t want me to spend Y5 now for about four days worth of service. The fact that Y5 is 40p didn’t occur to me until afterwards … So, how much am I paying for this SIM? UK readers might want to sit down, because the tariffs here are so ridiculously cheap.

Y15 per month (just gets taken off the card balance) which allows me 100 free texts to other Chinese mobiles. There were other tariffs of 20 and 30 RMB per month which gave 200 and 300 texts respectively, but I think here I will be calling more than texting. Add the Y5 caller ID display charge and I pay Y20 (£1.60) a month for the use of my phone. Calls are charged at different rates, depending on the time they are made – between 0900 and midnight they are charged at Y0.2/min (1.5p) and between midnight and 0900 this is reduced to Y0.1 … calls made to numbers outside of Xinjiang province are charged at a higher rate but this can be reduced a bit by dialing a special extension before the number, making the cost 0.39 at peak times and 0.19 offpeak, still dirt-cheap. The SIM cost Y100, but it came with Y100 credit on it, so effectively it was free.

Anyway, I had my phone up and running – ace. I went to the Post Office and got some touristy stuff sent off – might as well do the tourist stuff at the beginning, like postcards with pretty pictures, so Mum, Dad, Nana, Lucy, Lari and Jenna, you may get cards in the next few days … I don’t remember doing much else that day apart from waiting for Marta to eventually arrive, and when she did, watching my stress levels rise. She’s lovely but she’s an incredibly nervous, fretty character and it means more work for me trying to calm her down. She got into the hostel in the early evening, and took a couple of hours to sort herself out, having flown from Dusseldorf to Beijing and then on to Urumqi, where a taxi driver had ripped her off. What a great start for her.

We took dinner in the Kazakh place below the hostel – I say we, it was really me, she wasn’t so hungry – and then went out to see some Kazakh shops but for some reason they were all shut … instead, we bumped into one of the Chinese people working in the hostel, and he directed us to the Wu Yi Night Market, a big T-shaped affair, the horizontal bar of the T being food stalls (all remarkably similar, and quite unappealing I thought), the vertical section being miscellaneous stalls selling jewellery, clothes, knives, batons, exercise equipment, candy-floss, and so on. It was interesting, but a little samey after a while and of course neither of us could be sure our stomachs weren’t going to turn nasty at any moment. On our way out of the market though, Marta stopped to buy some melon (which turned out to be a good call, since it was very tasty) and my eye was taken by a cart with a load of rocks on it. Except these rocks smelt really good, almost like … no, it can’t be … that’s honey! Yup, it was solid honey – the stall owner broke a bit off for us to try, and it is the best honey I have ever tasted. I think I’ll have to go back to get some, it was that good.

We got back to the hostel and got our heads down quite fast because the next day we had made plans to register with the university and meet a teacher (a friend of the students who were here last year) who would help us look for a house which would be a real help to sort out before we start lessons.