The tallest building in Ürümqi, under construction since forever – at least since I first arrived there and still under construction when I left – as seen from Hong Shan.
The first part of my journey is over. I’m in Seattle, four hours north of Portland. It’s been quite a week so far, culminating in the presidential debate.
The week’s been filled with confirmations; of those stereotypes everybody is familiar with. Buildings are big, as are cars, and people. The United States fulfills its role naturally, of the nation we’ve come to expect it to be.
But not only confirmations, also surprises. Occasionally this country is a bad actor, leaves the role it’s been assigned, and leaves me to reinterpret the play its a part of.
People are extremely hospitable, for a start. Or maybe that’s another role that is played out in front of me. More on that some other time though.
For now let me leave you with the plans for the next few weeks.
On Friday I’ll travel back to Portland, and together with Allison and friends we’ll spend the weekend at the Oregon coast. I won’t go to Chicago, it’s cheaper and less time consuming to take the train south, to the Bay area and San Francisco. From there I’ll eventually fly to New York, where I’ll meet up with some other friends
Portland, OR
Portland, OR
Portland, OR
Portland, OR
Portland, OR
Portland, OR
My trip so far? On the Friday of my arrival I could only sleep. But on Saturday marathon preparations got underway. We chilled out in town and loaded up on carbs. Sunday was the day of the Portland marathon, in which I ran 15 kilometers. In the afternoon we relaxed our muscles with the help of plenty alcohol, and a Red Sox baseball game at the bar. On Monday we went to the pool to ease our legs, and then drove up the Columbia river gorge; more beers in the evening. Tuesday I did some shopping and got ready to board the bus to Seattle. In the evening we watched the presidential debate, of course, in a theatre where the launch party of the Obama iPhone app took place.
The history and environment of Xinjiang furthermore got lots of attention in a recent hour-long episode of the BBC series “Wild China.” (see episode 4: “Beyond the Great Wall.”)
Vandaag begint het dan. Ik ren tegen Wouter in een running battle over 21 dagen. Wie legt er in die tijd de meeste kilometers af en wint? Een gestreden strijd al voordat we beginnen? We zullen zien…
Good news. As of the 26th of Oktober we won’t have to use clunky workarounds anymore to get Uighur to display correctly on an Apple computer. On the 26th Apple will be releasing a new version of their operating system, Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard”. Have a look at their “list of 300+ new features“, under “International” is says:
Enhanced International Font Support Enjoy enhanced support for international fonts. Several fonts have improved Russian and Polish support; the Korean system font now supports the full set of modern Hangul; there are two new fonts in Tibetan; all built-in Arabic fonts now support Persian; and Leopard supports three additional Arabic-based scripts in Geeza Pro, Uyghur, Kurdish, and Jawi.
Yes, if it works as it says here it works then you’ll be able to use Uighur text in all Mac OS X applications and without having to rely on X11 or OpenOffice.org to display the script correctly.
I was aware of Apple being in talks with developers of Uighur fonts, their offices in de Hongqiao computer market off Zhongshan Lu in Urumqi, China. I also petitioned Apple by e-mail to include Uighur support in their upcoming release. But not until I saw the announcement today did I know if Uighur support would indeed be included.
