The Pre-Toi and the Toi: Chinggil

The eighteenth, the eighteenth, the eighteenth. It was brought up several times a day, at least once a day someone would ask me: "You're not leaving before the 18th, right? You're staying for the toi, aren't you?"

Yes, I would nod. "Yes, I'm staying."

I didn't, after all, have anything pressing or even alluring in Urumqi, but I was getting a little tired of wearing the same pair of pants and alternating between two t-shirts. But I knew I didn't have a choice in the matter and I was happy to have an excuse to hang around.

The partying began a couple days in advance as relatives from near and far converged upon the house for the pre-pre-party, the pre-party, the inbetween celebrations, the impromptu drinking fests, the endless tea, the dizzying platters of meat....

The tea spreads were out almost 24 hours a day and the women ran to and fro supplying endless amounts of milk tea, butter, candies, and fried bread things to the masses. The house became nearly public as relatives, neighbors, friends, and even one roaming beggar just wandered in and out partaking of whatever was on offer at the moment.

To give you an idea of the size of these bubbling cauldrons of meat, it was not sloppy photography on my part that cut off the sides, it was the fact that there simply was no getting the whole thing in the picture. I was nearly bent over backwards with my camera over my head, and that was the best I could do.

These are all the leftover parts of a sheep that was slaughtered to welcome the guests (a Kazakh tradition) thrown together to make innards soup. Yum. It's one of the things you have to take with a smile, like the butter in your tea and the slippery hunks of mutton fat.

Anyway, the whole Bacchanalian affair was a celebration of excess with nonstop drinking and eating (it was the first time I'd actually seen people get up and drink in the morning to cure their hangovers). A couple of people mentioned that while this made sense in the old days when most people were too poor to eat their fill and relax except on occasions like this, it's perhaps not necessary anymore.

I was grateful when the day of the 18th arrived and the party itself was pretty low-key. We danced, we ate, we drank, and headed home (it was held at a banquet hall) at a pretty reasonable hour where I was forced to drink only a little more before scouting out a place to sleep in a space not previously occupied by unfamiliar bodies.

Finally, I thought to myself, I can start sleeping again and no one will make me drink baijiu.