Urumqi is further from the sea than any other city in the world. I think that's a pretty cool fact. There's not much to do when you can't go to the beach, though. We enjoyed a meal in the night market (although I'm never convinced by paying to cook my own food, unlike C), ate some good local bread that has an amazing ability to go stale minutes after leaving the oven and walked around, a lot.
The museum here is almost excellent and is probably the best I've seen in China. I didn't learn huge amounts but I enjoyed seeing the exhibits and reading some of the entertaining propaganda about how happy people in Xianjing are to have the Chinese as their overlords. The museum also has three mummies and who doesn't like mummies?
It took a while to work out why we were seeing so many armed police and soldiers on the streets but we eventually got there: it was one year since the riots a few days after we left and Big Brother wanted to make sure there was no repeat. We saw nothing interesting save from the soldiers themselves and never felt any tension while there. Most of the soldiers looked like kids with guns. I don't much like kids with guns.
Urumqi, like Turpan was interesting because it's the edge of a vast empire. In Urumqi one sees people of many ethnicities: Chinese, Uyghur, Tajik, Uzbek, Russian, Mongolian, Tibetan... the list goes on and so does the list of languages you can hear on the street. I enjoyed seeing Russian, Chinese and Uyghur together on shop walls.
Upon arrival we headed straight out to the night market, a two hour walk from our hotel through the streets of Urumqi. Last time I was in China many people asked if I was from this region of China and although it still makes me laugh it now makes a bit more sense. The Ughiuirs (sp) can look as European as we do and many don't look dissimilar to me.
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