Pirates of the Karamay-ian

Well, we have two crazy stories for you today, accompanied by two equally crazy photos. When we were first told that we would be moving into a hotel while they worked on our apartment, we decided to travel a few hours south to visit a town with our friends the Edminsons. We wanted to see a few other towns here in China as well as do a little bit of shopping. We eventually made it to the capital of our province, Urumqi (pronouned yur-um-shee), and let's just say it made us very thankful for our small town of Karamay. The town was incredibly busy, dirty, crowded, and loud. There are perks to a big town, however, and one of those is good shopping. On our list of items we wanted to get was believe it or not - DVD's. There are many nights when you don't have much to do here, and relaxing in front of a movie is very nice (and will be great in the winter, also, from what we are told). I don't know how many of you have been watching world news lately, but China is finally being admitted as a nation in the WTO, an accomplishment that had been hampered among other things by a huge problem with widespread illegal copyright infringement (making and selling copies of DVD's or CD's without permission from the copyright owners). China's admittance in the WTO was on the basis that they find a way to curb this growing problem, and they have done a pretty good job. Thankfully for us, they have not completely succeeded! Now many of you may be thinking right now - "Hey Josh, didn't you go to school to learn all about copyright stuff and doesn't buying pirated DVD's go against everything you've been taught and believe?!" My answer...well, yes. BUT let me also add another important fact of supply and demand - if there is no legal supply, yet there still remains great demand, what else is there to do? So here we have a picture of our stash of movies we hauled back from Urumqi. Crazy? What's crazy is how little we spent, an amount I refuse to disclose to the world on this blog, to amass a library of 80 movies and a few TV series. That's crazy.

Ok, here's story number two very quickly. A friend of ours allowed us to save money by giving us a private car and driver to get us back to Karamay after we were finished in Urumqi (a very nice, and yet not-to-uncommon thing, I think). The main road to Karamay is a toll road, however, and in order for the driver to save himself a little extra money, he took the back roads to bypass the toll way. Bad decision. A trip which should have taken on a bus one and a half hours took almost 3 hours! Believe it or not, that's not the crazy part. At one point on the trip the driver took a right off the main road (we're not sure yet what he was trying to avoid) and then began off-roading on some sand dunes. We all found this to be quite odd, but dismissed it at first thinking he knew what he was doing. That was mistake number two (mistake #1 was getting in this taxi in the first place!). We all realized together, the driver included, that he had brought us on a high plateau of sand dunes - and the city of Karamy was below the plateau. He tried many times to find a road or trail that would take us down this mini-mountain and when he finally found what he considered a viable option, each one of us in unison jumped out of the car and told the crazy man we would walk the rest of the way - thank you very much! Not only was this slope very steep but it had moguls that could rival those of a Colorado mountain! In this picture you see the small taxi "skiing" down this sand slope to get to the lower level where we all reluctantly got back in and made it safely to the city. He was one crazy dude!

Thankfully we all know that there is One who is watching over us, and we have never really been in great danger here in China (it is actually very, very safe here). Thank you all for your e-mails and support so far - we miss you and hope you enjoy our stories!