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We were in Urumqi for a couple of hours, but most of that was spent crawling across the city centre in a terrible traffic jam, and then back out of the city in a minibus on its way to Bagang, where Hannah's project was based. Visiting Bagang was exciting for several reasons: first, we'd get to slob around and relax for a couple of days; second, we'd be reunited with Beth and Dan there and finally, we'd get to try gotye, the local fried dumpling specialty that Hannah had not shut up about for the past six months.
We arrived early afternoon, changed into our pyjamas, ran to the shop for snacks and established ourselves on the sofa to work our way through the formidable collection of DVDs Hannah had accrued throughout the year. At least, Hannah and I did - Cat was asleep within minutes and just woke up every hour or so to mumble confusedly at us. For dinner, we walked through town to the restaurant which serves the famous gotye. These were, if possible, just as good as Hannah had said. Afterwards, she took us next door to a small, cheap jewellery store where she knew the owner, which we weren't allowed to leave until we'd accepted several pairs of free earrings (we opted for very tacky matching pairs). Then, back at Hannah's, we settled down with more snacks to watch more films until we fell asleep.
The next day was spent partly in the world's crappest internet cafe and mostly sat with ice-creams in a sunny park near Hannah's house. Beth and Dan arrived late in the afternoon, so there were five of us to go for gotye and watch films together that evening. We also took turns bragging about the last few weeks: Beth and Dan about how cute their students were, us about things we'd seen recently... and then the next morning we packed all of our things together and left to catch the train to Kashgar.
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