Sunday Bazaar in Hotan
August 30th, 2010 at 0:00Hotan’s Sunday bazaar rivals the one in kashgar, but the best part is the lack if tourists. It was a pleasant chaos that stretched over a large area and even out in the streets where motorcycles and horse or donkey carriages where transporting everything from people to wood. It is organised into different areas for different products such as carpets, hats, scarf etc etc
Close to the bazaar is a small jade workshop, one part where they have eight stations making jade jewelry and an other with jade for sale. Hotan is full of street stands selling jade or at least jade looking stones. Not having a clue how to tell the difference we spent some time in the workshop looking at everything from small stones from qinghai mountains for one hundred rmb to white hotan river jade bracelets exceeding 80,000 rmb. As usual, after seeing really good jade you cannot but cheap ones so ended up buying a simple necklace of white hotan jade from the kunlun mountains for a somewhat higher price than planned….
After two weeks we have started do some souvenir shopping and after stocking up on home made jam and honey, next mission is to find a post office and send it all to shanghai.
