Getting my culture on.

One of the few things I knew about Yinchuan when I arrived here was that it had a significant Hui Muslim population, but once here there wasn't a lot of active seeking out of the Muslim culture that has influenced the city – unless, of course, you count the abundance of amazing Muslim food we eat here. Sure lots of the street signs are in pinyin (English characters), Chinese and Arabic; and sure, there was that beautiful Muslim area we went to early on but we didn't really know anything about the culture itself.

Definitive proof that I can actually jump.

That is until school decided to take all the staff on a trip to the Hui Culture Park and Great Mosque just outside the city limits. It was amazing! I've always loved Islamic architecture with all it's intricacy, but I'd never really seen it close up.

To get to the Hui Culture Park the school had hired a bus to take us all; not a coach, literally a local bus, so we shivered in our little plastic seats for the 45 minute drive out of the city. The first thing that we saw of the Culture Park was the dome of the impressive entrance. Standing majestic and shining white in the winter sun it really was a beautiful sight that made the bumpy and cold journey completely worth it. With the domes and white marble there was a striking resemblance to the Taj Mahal and my main feeling was awe. I'm a bit of an architecture nerd so I probably got a little bit too exciting about the swirling carvings and beautiful tiles everywhere you looked.

The Golden Palace

Our first stop was the Hui Culture Museum and, despite 99% of the information being in Chinese and no one thinking to translate what our tour guide was saying, we managed to learn a bit about the Hui culture in China. We learnt how merchants coming into China along the Silk Road settled and assimilated to Chinese life to create their own unique fusion of Islamic and Chinese culture, and how they adapted their Islamic practices to incorporate some of the Chinese Confucian beliefs and customs.

But as little as we could learn, the museum was full of beautiful examples of Hui pottery, clothes, armoury and anything else you could think of related to their culture – including the smallest Koran in the world!

The other main attraction was the Golden Palace, a golden domed Mosque as stunning inside as it is from the outside. Photos and words don't really do the place justice, but I'll do my best. The best way to describe the Golden Palace is as a visual overload of blues, yellows, and reds; patterns covering every wall, the floor and the ceiling. While most of the Chinese staff headed back to the bus to warm up, a couple of us stayed back in the Palace to explore it's upper chambers. It was such a peaceful and hypnotic place that I could have spent much longer marvelling, but we had to settle for an all-too-quick browse of the place. Because it's an Islamic building we had to take off our shoes and cover our heads for any photos we took, and padding around under the huge dome in silence was somehow a really amazing feeling. We may have kept the group waiting a while, but I'd say it was worth it to fully take the time to appreciate the beauty of the place.

Cultural excursions and touristing is something that we have been terrible at since we arrived. By the time Sunday evening comes around and we reach our “weekend” all I want to do is relax and completely slob out, but when the effort is made to actually go out and see something it's well worth it. To be fair we did attempt a cultural excursion to the Great Wall the other weekend but it turned into a complete farce as we successfully proved that miscommunication doesn't only happen between Chinese and English speakers! The struggle to get the right information in China doesn't discriminate! I was going to write about out trip to the Great Wall but our American friend, Becky, did such a good job on her blog that I'm not going to try to improve on such a perfect capturing of the ridiculousness of the situation and I’ll just point all those interested in the direction of her blog: http://therovingduo.tumblr.com.

I don't know how anyone managed to keep their eyes open, it was so sunny!