Tuesday, October 13, 2009

inner mongolia- a horror trip.

I should've posted this a week ago, but well, have been to lazy and too busy to update the blog.
The holidays are over and we have the first exam on friday. kinda started living in the Bridge Cafe, spending there 11 hours is not normal, but the place is just too comfy. So if someone ever reads this blog beside my friends and wants to come to Beijing, go to the Bridge Cafe at Wudaokou, one of the best here.

ok, now about my trip to Inner Mongolia.
as the title already says, it has been a horror trip.
we didn't expect it to be so fucking incredibly cold there since our teacher told us to NOT take our wintershoes and winter coats with us.
haha, funny. yes indeed.
after a long and very tiring bus drive, especially since we didn't sleep the night before and spend the time talking with Richi (OH RICHI SARANGHAE!! khm), we arrived at the capital of Inner Mongolia called Hohhot.



the city was surprisingly modern and pretty cool, people seem to dress a bit better than in Beijing. but instead of staying at the nice hotel the next day, they decided it is good for us to make a real mongolian experience, go to the grassland and sleep in a hut.
so we arrived at the grassland, ate something (worst food ever so far) and went to the horse riding. the prizes were way too high so some of us spend half an hour trying to get it lower (thanks to the peeps, but 2 hours would have been more than enough, getting 3 hours was unnecessary). I don't remember how much we paid, but compared to something like this in germany, it was still cheap enough, as anything else here in china.
3 hours on a horse (well, it has been 3 different horses) broke my body and my will to live. I mean if the horse was walking slowly, everything would have been fine..but this mix between running and not..and the horrible saddle made me to a handicap for the next two days where I couldn't walk up the stairs on my own because of the sore body.
but it was kinda fun compared to what followed.
a night in a hut.

I imagine a real mongolian hut with a bit more blankets and pillows and kinda thicker walls, but as you can see on the picture..nothing like this was waiting for us, poor tourists.
the temperature inside the same as outside. to sum it up: COLD.
we could rent some old weird coats (we called them MAO coat) which were really smelly but at least warm and we spend the night trying to cuddle and keep each other from freezing to death.literally.

the next day we went to the desert. yes, from freezing cold to a hot hot summer in one day. it was more relaxing, we could ride on a camel, well, the ones who were still able to sit after the horrible saddle the day before. sitting on a camel didn't hurt that much, but standing up afterwards killed the last little bit of hope of ever being able to walk normally again.

nothing spectacular happened afterwards except for a very long bus drive back to beijing and an embarrassing running into Richi and his Girlfriend in an elevator.