Our first full day in Kashgar started with a long, meandering walk through the Old City in search of something to eat for breakfast, a search made difficult by its being Ramadan in a near-wholly Muslim area. All we could find was the odd stall hung with skinned, headless sheep (these sheep really confused me because they seemed to have neck stumps at each end of their body.), but eventually we managed to find a fruit stall behind one of these meat stalls where we could buy apples and peaches, and later another stall selling naan bread and giant bagels. None of us minded this excursion, and the effort of the walk was more than rewarded when we noticed that the stalls we did come across were doling out their produce in Morrissons bags.

More annoying was when we tried to set off to visit the famous Sunday market and the hostel staff talked us into accepting a friend of theirs as a guide, then into waiting for this friend of theirs to arrive... which took hours. The friend, when she finally arrived, was a small girl with a long ponytail and a friend of her own in tow. Both were university students wanting to practice their English. If it weren't for the wait, we wouldn't have minded, because it's always miles easier to find your way around and organise your sightseeing with a local friend, but we were all quite annoyed by the time they showed up. Both were friendly but, as we later found, not desperately well-informed about several bits of essential Sunday Market information. For example, when it closed.

Because it's grown so enormous, the Kashgar Sunday Market has been split into two parts: the livestock market, which takes place just outside the main bit of the city, and the everything-else market, which is a short bus ride from the Id Kah mosque. The girls told us (wrongly) that the livestock market would be open till 5pm Uighur-time, so we went to the everything-else market first. En route, Dan invested in a doppa hat of his own in what quickly revealed itself to be the most popular design: 80% of the little old men we passed throughout the rest of the day were wearing the exact same hat. The everything-else market is held indoors, in a never-ending warehouse with a high roof and a million alleyways formed by the different stalls. I was expecting it to be more old-fashioned and traditional than it was. The various fabric and material stalls made up the majority of the market, and they were an explosion of lurid patterns and super-bright colours, a lot of which actually seemed a bit tacky. There were plenty of pretty things in amongst this, but it's always the ugliest things that catch your eye first, and that's what I noticed the most. Beth, Dan and Hannah spent ages haggling and bickering with one shopkeeper over a deal on embroidered white shirts; Cat bought a scarf and we dressed her up with it wrapped around her hair like a Uighur woman; Dan and I went from shop to shop looking at famous Uighur knives, which we were wanting to bring back as gifts, with some shopkeepers following us into other shops with better deals until finally we left with a huge bag of knives at a stupidly low price.

The Ramadan-induced lack of lunchtime options forced us into what turned out to be a quite nice, if quite expensive, tourist-orientated restaurant a taxi ride from the market. (Half of us had a local specialty stew, half of us had paninis.) Then it was time to visit the livestock market, the highlight of the day and the main reason we'd come all the way to Kashgar... unfortunately, as it turned out, it was also time for the livestock market to start packing up and close, because it didn't, as our guides had assured us, close at 7pm, but at about 4pm. Naturally, we were all really disappointed. We arrived full of plans to haggle with farmers over how many cows or sheep they would offer us in exchange for Cat, but three-quarters of them had already gone home and most of those who were left were in the process of loading up their animals and leaving. It was maybe one of the biggest screw-ups we've had travelling, and it was even more annoying because it could so easily have been avoided. There wasn't any point in getting upset about it though, so we plunged into the nearly-empty market place anyway and set about seeing everything we could of what was left. This was mostly just an empty expanse of dirt covered in the poo of the thousands of animals who'd been there earlier, but there were still some farmers and their animals about. My personal highlights were the many sightings of Funny Bum sheep (I don't know the name of the breed or anything, but basically they're quite skinny sheep with huge pillows of fat stuck on their bums and they look hilarious) and the three men trying to life a cow onto their trailer. Their method for this was essentially to give the cow a leg-up, so they'd all gather by one hoof and try to hoist it onto the trailer; if they succeeded, they'd all scurry round to the second hoof and try to do the same there, although usually the first hoof would slip down whilst they were doing this. It was a truly magnificent struggle. When they finally got both front hooves onto the trailer, they all ran round to the back of the cow and tried to hoist it onto the trailer by the bum, whilst the cow danced about awkwardly half-on half-off the trailer. I can't remember how exactly they managed it in the end, I just remember that it took them ages and it was really, really funny.

Getting back could have been difficult as we were a little bit in-the-middle-of-nowhere, but Beth and Cat somehow found two guys willing to let us all crowd into the back of a trailer they'd been selling watermelons from earlier, which we did, and they drove us back to the city. Nothing much happened until dinner really, apart from the discovery of mine and Beth's new favourite soft drink, ZamZam cola, the most additive-y and brilliant drink we've yet found (it's so zammy!). We went for dinner at the night market again, where we creeped on several Western tourists we spotted, Cat shared a moment of intense eye contact with a creepily good-looking old man and we watched a woman steal someone else's peeled egg from their table whilst she was looking the other way. We witnessed a beautifully awkward moment where one of the Western tourists mistook an old lady's shopping bag for a bin, tossed some bones in it, then realised and fled in horror. Then we bought some more of the amazing ice cream and started to walk back, although we got caught in a sandstorm on our way and had to spend the rest of the walk picking out of our ice cream the bits of polystyrene that had been blown into it.

This was our last night in Kashgar.