Urumqi, China
The road across the desert is in good condition
and surprisingly cell phone signal was pretty good all along the way.
Saw 2 big wind farms along the way. China has one of the biggest wind farms in the world.
Arrived in Urumqi at around 12pm after 26 hours on the bus. Spending Chistmas in Urumqi..yea..
Urumqi is the biggest city in western China with population of around 3 millions. The word Urumqi means beautiful pastures in Mongolian language. Han Chinese are the majority, with 70% of the population and Uygur consists of 15% of the population. The city was pretty cold, temperature was below -20C.
I think Communist China is the closest example to the perfect competition economy we studied in economic textbook. From what I can recall was that, there won’t be marginal/abnormal profit in an perfect competitive economy. From what we learned in school, America was not considered a perfect competitive economy and most people don’t even considered CHina as a market economy then. There are restaurants and hotels everywhere in the 2 cities I had visited and I can feel that business are so competitive here that marginal profit is close to zero.
Found Hotel Brothers on YanAnLu for (60Yuan~USD$9).
Later I found out that the JUly 5th riot was started around this area.
Around BianJiangBinGuan area, there are many traders and business people from Central Asian countries. Most of the signs here have 3 languages, Mandarin, Uygur and Russian. The Cyrillic characters reminded me of my trip in Central Asia.
Tried to get some warmer clothes at the bazaar.
ErDaoQiao market
Carrefour and KFC were the earlier western brands that invested in China. The investments paid off and these companies are holding a big market share in China currently.
City View
The architectures here have some Islamic influences.
Is this a real Uniqlo?
After the riot in JUly 5th, SMS and long distance call can’t be made. I had to wait 2 hours at CHina telecom office
to make a Christman eve call overseas. The customer service so far in China had been top class and better than what I expected.
Clowns inside a mall
Ice Carving at GUangChang.
Chinese fast food company, Best Food.
The manager told me that this brand has in business since 10 years ago. New competitions for KFC and McD.
Today is Christmas Eve and it seemed many Chinese joined in the celebration with some people wearing Santa’s hat and Christmas decorations in stores. When I use the word Chinese, I am including the different ethnicity such as Uygur, Kazakhs, HUi…
Found a bar at YouHaoLu with Christmas Eve performance.
