My week in Inner Mongolia

Ok so I've been dreading this wall post simply because I do not have any idea HOW to begin summarizing this week. So instead of just chronologically narrating the week, I think I will just discuss a few points that made this week so interesting. Then you can check out this album of pics. There were wayy too many pictures for me to try to pic a few to put in this blogpost. WARNING: if you don't want to see our dinner being slaughtered, don't look at pics 13-25!

Points of Interest:

1. Yurts. Traditional Mongolian tent-like things. Except they are way sturdier than tents and were actually pretty comfortable to sleep in. We stayed in them the first three days (when we were on grasslands) but we were in hotels after that. It was basically akin to sleeping on the floor. They provided us with cute blankets and everything. It was nice. The real hard part of staying on the grasslands was...

2. Bathrooms. Or really the lack thereof. I'm talking hole in the ground. Sometimes with a little wooden house so that you don't quite feel like you're just going on the ground. But you are. And there are often flies. And we couldn't shower for 3 days.

3. Food. Inner Mongolia had really delicious food. It wasn't as greasy as the food in Beijing so I was very happy. The one thing I won't miss however was their milk tea. Its special quality is the added salt flavor. Yes. Salty tea. Not delicious. Everything else was. Watching them kill the lamb with their bare hands was a little traumatic. But it seemed pretty painless.

4. Farm Life. So our first few days we got to interact with actual farmers. We not only watched them kill things, but we got to ask them about their daily lives and ideals. This was perhaps on of the more stronger impacts this trip had on me. I'm basically writing a paper now about how that older traditions of Inner Mongolia (and really China in general) are disappearing. We saw their folk dance and listened to folk music. We even watched their horse races and wrestling. And we visited a Buddhist temple. But with a very quickly developing China, the current generation is very distanced from these traditions. The people on the farm were not able to go to school during the Cultural Revolution so now they are quickly sending their kids off to school. The children live at school and only come back for brief summer and winter vacations. They all plan to go to college so that they can get jobs and support their parents, most of whom plan to move out of the farms. (A lot of the farms are subsidized by the government and have contracts that will expire in ten years anyway). In interviewing high school and college students, we learned that they all feel extremely worried about the job market because China's insanely large population makes it so hard for people to find jobs. They all study sciences rather than art because that's where the money is at and a lot of them plan to move to America or other countries to attend university and then find jobs. The current generation mostly does not follow the religion of their parents and say they often disagree ideologically with their parents views. Furthermore, they are very interested in American culture (eg Music and movies) and while they respect their traditions as a meaningful to their historical identity, they do not find them currently relevant.

4. "The Stare" So in Beijing people don't particularly stare at me because they have all seen foreigners before and this neighborhood is basically centered around this foreign student's university. But going into the streets of Inner Mongolia, I got the stares I was promised. It was at once amusing and uncomfortable. I walked past the souvenir shops into the streets lined with everyday grocery, hardware, homeware stores. I could immediately tell I was the first Latino (or even generally colored) person these people have ever seen. Some people even slowed down their cars to watch me. But their stares weren't accusatory or unwelcoming, just curious. So occasionally I said "ni hao" and got very happy "ni hao"s in return. I even had a conversation with the family that owned a grocery store. We talked about why I was in China and then they introduced me to their young son. They asked him if he recognized that I was a foreigner. He shyly smiled and ran outside.

5. Random Fun Things. Riding horses, camelriding, motorcar racing, and sandsurfing in the desert, watching a concert, visiting the largest dairy factory in China etc... Overall it was a really fun trip. We spent A LOT of time on the bus going from place to place because nothing was near anything else. But all the places we did go were incredibly fun and helped me learn a lot more about the Chinese way of life than staying in the HBA bubble on campus has.