Arriving in Kashgar felt like arriving in a totally different country. For a start, there were barely any Chinese people - or, Han Chinese people. In fact, the only Han Chinese people I saw were those working in the train station. Everyone else looked to be Uighur, with darker skin, bigger noses and green eyes. The girls were wearing long skirts and patterned scarves instead of the tiny shorts and glittery t-shirts we're used to seeing, and the majority of the men were wearing square embroidered caps, called doppas. Buildings were different too, especially in the Old City, where our hostel was. The buildings here were prettily tiled or painted, with carved windows and cornices and patterns in their brickwork. Apparently the Old City is the oldest traditional Islamic city in Asia or something like that - I'm not sure if that's exactly right, but it might not be for long. Looking out from the roof terrace of our hostel, we could see huge swathes of rubble and half-demolished buildings where old neighbourhoods were being knocked down, presumably for new builds.

Our hostel was particularly pretty, if not desperately comfortable. The rooms looked like the inside of a little girl's music box, with every inch of the walls carved and painted in pastels and, strangely, glitter. If it sounds tacky, it wasn't - maybe a little sickly, but not tacky. The major downside was that none of the rooms had air conditioning (which many would argue is necessary in a desert environment) and that the beds in one of our rooms were nothing more than floor mattressed with blankets. The centre of the hostel was a small courtyard, where we sat around relaxing until it was late enough for us to go to dinner. Unbeknownst to us, we'd arrived in Kashgar in the middle of Ramadan, meaning there was nowhere open to sell food until the evening.

Even without Ramadan, we wouldn't have been able to eat until late, as we wanted to eat at the night market, which didn't start up until around 7pm Uighur time, which is two hours behind Beijing time. Uighur time is completely unofficial, but is used by most businesses in Xinjiang just because it's more convenient. In our experience, it was used by everyone apart from the train services. The night market was a short walk from the hostel, in a square opposite the Id Kah mosque - the largest mosque in China, fact fans. It was smaller than we'd expected, but absolutely packed and seeming even busier because half of your vision was obscured by smoke pouring from the various barbecues. Our dinner, then, was a dozen skewers of different types of kebab, chunks of fried fish, something uncannily like a Cornish pasty, iced camel milk from a small mechanical fountain, several naan breads and a whole roast duck, delivered to us hacked into pieces. We ate sat on a low wall outside the Id Kah mosque, adding the bones from our meal to the small piles already present in the flowerbed behind us and watching a trio of local men mock-wrestling and trying to style out each time they tripped and fell. When we'd finished, we walked back into the market in search of dessert. This was ice-cream churned at a rickety cart, although it didn't look like normal ice-cream; they laid it out on a metal dish when it was finished, and it looked more like congealed yoghurt than anything else. It tasted amazing though, by far the best ice-cream I've ever had. I also bought a carton of a strange honeyed ice drink that was being sold at the neighbouring stand, mainly because I was impressed by the way the small boy at the stand was making it: tossing crushed ice several feet into the air from a bowl as he poured honey into it, then throwing and the whole mixture for several minutes to mix it. This drink was actually weirdly bitter and not that nice, but at least it was interesting.

We rounded off our first night in Kashgar sitting with the other guests in our hostel. By chance, Beth and Dan had already met two of the other guests on the train into Kashgar. Their names were Dancer and Running Lion; Dancer was, surprisingly, a dancer, Running Lion was absolutely mental and they both enjoyed being the centre of attention. Dancer needed only the smallest encouragement from us to leap up and launch into a full professional ballet routine in the hostel courtyard, which, naturally, we all cheered enthusiastically. Running Lion also donated a bracelet to my ever-growing collection. We four girls then excused ourselves to a sleepover in the bedroom with the floor-bed, leaving Dan to entertain Dancer, Running Lion and a small group of other Chinese guys.