The hotel we picked is a chain in China called Hanting which is close to a Days Inn quality, except with free internet, but it was probably the most expensive hotel we have paid for in China. Everything in town was booked so we had no choice but went for the "luxurious big-bed room" and it still was only $20 a person a night. So after staying hostels it was a nice change and we slept in a little bit because Charlotte wasn't feeling well in the morning.
The town of Xining (西寧) is small for China, just over 2 million people, it is also home to the largest Muslim mosque in the region. We had heard going to witness the Friday early afternoon prayer was an amazing sight so we decided to check it out not really knowing what to expect. We weren't even sure when the early afternoon prayers would be, but around noon we left our hotel and headed to the mosque. Around 12:30 we started seeing more and more Muslim men walking in our direction so we knew we were on the right track. We got to the mosque around 12:45 and loads of Muslim men appeared out of no where, finding anyplace possible to set up their prayer rug, even on the streets. (sorry I know there is probably a proper term for the rug, but I don't know what it is). Overall we heard that there were 60,000 Muslims for this prayer service. It was a pretty amazing sight to see, I think even more than all the Tibetan and Buddhist religious sites we have been to, because this was occurring in the middle of a large city of communist China, not hidden away in the mountains like most of the other religious sites we were at.
People arriving at the Mosque
Finding a place to pray
Waiting to cross the street towards the Mosque
Some children just laid down plastic sheets to pray on
Some people just blocked off the road to pray
The entire sidewalk was blocked (notice the guy taking a picture of me with his phone)
After the prayers started, we went off and had some lamb dumplings in a Muslim restaurant then headed back to our hotel. The rest of the afternoon we ran some errands and then I went back to the hotel and worked on booking hostels and figuring out our route for the next couple days, while Charlotte went shopping in a couple street markets. When she got back it was time for dinner, so we walked around another market and then found a hotpot restaurant for dinner. They had display cases that are full of different meats on sticks, each stick was about 5 cents. They also had a bunch of stuff on plates that was a little more expensive.
We didn't add the brains to our hotpot!
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