And, Oh No, the Post-Toi

No one told me there were going to be more parties after the pre-parties and the big party, but I sucked it up and went to the mountains with everyone for one last celebration of gluttony.

There was meat, meat, more meat, baijiu, beer, and more baijiu.... I couldn't very well refuse on my last day with most of these people (being a guest among Kazakhs is not something to be taken lightly). Can you find the bottle of liquor in this photograph? It was the last of many bottles that day, and from it I downed the final of many toasts, hoping this one would actually be my last taste of baijiu for a while.

I went home pretty toasty that day and slept off the previous week, thankfully in a mostly empty house as the guests started returning home, one by one.

Sadly, my time for leaving was also coming up as I had a housing crisis to deal with in Urumqi and two guests from the States coming.

So I bid farewell to grandma, baby, and my little semi-idyllic slice of life with the "real" Kazakhs to return to city madness.

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.

And Then, Time Stopped: Chinggil

I only had a few days' worth of clothing in my bag and the most basic things I needed for hiking but I didn't really want to go home. What was waiting for me in Urumqi? Noise, pollution, harassment. And in the tiny community BaiXing (百兴) outside the village Chinggil (清河）? Peace and quiet，cows, doing laundry by hand using soap made from sheep fat, babysitting (yes, really), hauling water from the well, swimming in the river, following grandma around and chatting with her. In a word, my version of paradise for a while.
I had wanted to find a Kazakh village to stay in for the summer, a place where I could integrate myself into the family life, speak Kazakh every day, and get out of the harried stress of the city for a while. My efforts failed. The authorities here in Xinjiang don't let foreigners go just anywhere, and they often don't want you to stay in locals' homes. It's a sensitive area with strict rules that are prone to change.

This one just fell into my lap. After coming back from the mountains, I was invited to stay longer. Invited is not quite the word...it was more of a demand. A little boy in the family was to have a toi on the eighteenth, and no one was going to let me on a bus before then.

The local authorities didn't care, either. After a trip to the main police station in town to register me, they made it clear that they didn't care to see my face again and didn't care how long I stayed, as long as I didn't overstay my visa that allows me be in this country. Fine by me.

A toi is a kind of party, a sort of rite of passage. There are several of them in everyone's life, with variations depending on sex. This one was a sundet toi, or circumcision party.











So to kill the time between then and the party, I just did my best to help out around the house. Here, we are making baursaq, little balls of fried dough that are sort of like donuts, only not sweet. And made the old-fashioned way, with plenty of lard.

There were plenty of things that I couldn't help out with, but I made an enthusiastic observer and gave people someone to chat with.

That may not have been an advantage as, due to my fairly low level of Kazakh, they were practically limited to baby-talk, but everyone was pretty good-natured about it.

And so the days flowed on. I was often bored but never unhappy, and though I wished I had brought more than one flimsy little condensed copy of Arabian Nights in Chinese, I didn't want to be anywhere else.

No Time to Lose: Somewhere near Mongolia, Xinjiang

Classes were supposed to end on July 6, I think. But I was hanging on by my fingernails and well aware that a few more days of classes would do nothing for me except push me closer to the brink, so I waited till I fulfilled the one responsibility I couldn't shrug off (finishing teaching my uni classes) and then rushed in a taxi directly from class to catch a bus up to Northern Xinjiang.

Two days later, as if the end-of-semester frenzy had never existed, my main concern became having too much salty milk tea poured down my throat as we wandered through the mountains that border Outer Mongolia.

My companions were Li Zhuangxuan (my classmate from last post), his friend Meirambek (local Kazakh musician who is now living in Beijing), and Meirambek's childhood friend Janibek. I had stumbled off a sleeper bus around 3:30am on Friday morning, and we got on two motorbikes and sped off into the mountains that afternoon.

We slept under the stars, went hiking, listened to Meirambek play the dombra (traditional two-stringed Kazakh instrument).


One day, we climbed to the top of the highest peak around, and discovered an interesting reminder that these mountains were once populated by Mongolians, not Kazakhs. In the middle of a large field littered with horse bones, was a huge pile of horse skulls.

"This wasn't done by Kazakhs. We don't do this. Must have been done by Mongolians at least a hundred years ago." Both of my local friends agreed no Kazakh would possibly do this.

Later, David's Mongolian friend Meendai explained that Mongolians build these as a way to establish a kind of communication with the heavens. They are considered sacred places and cannot be sullied.

On our way back down the mountain, we ran into a family moving to their summer pasture. In these mountains, most of the Kazakhs still lead a traditional, nomadic life, moving about three times a year. Some families move by tractor, but many still use this more traditional means of transportation.



The wooden frame being carried by the camel in the back is the changiraq, the opening at the top of a yurt used for ventilation and climate control. In the Kazakh language, it is often used a larger metaphor for the home and family.

We spent a few happy days and cold nights in the mountains before heading back to town so that Li Zhuangxuan could prepare to return to Korea. At that time I was also planning to head back to Urumqi pretty quickly.