Uyghur

With the recent trouble surrounding Uyghur inmates being release from Guantanamo, as well as attempts by the Chinese government to "preserve" the Uyghur city of Kashgar by destroying it, I've decided to look into the Uyghur people and culture. While I haven't looked into it enough to report anything other than the fact that it seems to be damn fascinating (and really, what culture isn't?), it's made me think about the weird blank space a lot of us have on our internal atlases, which, in my experience, tends to stretch from somewhere east of Prague to somewhere west of Beijing.

Now, this might not be true for any of you reading this, but in my experience there really is a surprising lack of knowledge concerning these areas. In some ways, this should be surprising, as even Eastern Europe seems exotic some days, but at the same time, it's really sad, as we're missing out on a lot of cool stuff. Many of these cultures and peoples were central to the silk trade, and as such there is a compelling mixture between what many people would call "Middle Eastern" and "Far Eastern" culture. I think my friend Karen gives the best example of the cultural possibilities of this region:

There’s a Uyghur restaurant around the corner from my mom’s apartment in Shanghai: I went there once, and was totally perplexed by a cute, vaguely-Asian-but-mostly-Russian-looking guy with blue eyes speaking perfect Mandarin who made me a lamb pie spiced with cumin. I was like, “Well, this mash-up of cultures and ethnicities is delightfully unfamiliar to me.”

Moments like this make me realise that no matter how small we may feel the world is, there's way more out there than we'll ever encounter in a lifetime. That and I now totally have a craving for lamb pie.