Around 7:35 a.m. we pulled into Hohot’s, the provincial capital of Inner Mongolia (Nei Menggu, 内蒙古), train station. If you tell a Chinese person you’re going to Hohot, however, chances are they will have no clue what you’re talking about because its Chinese name is Hohehaote. I’m not sure why we don’t just use the pinyin … to complicated for white people to handle?
For breakfast we popped into a fast food restaurant adjacent to the station where they were serving two-foot long fried dough sticks. Most people were dipping theirs into a white soup, but we couldn’t figure out how to get some, so we dumped sugar on top and chowed down.
Next, we drove out over a super winding road into the grasslands. Our driver must have been determined to make it in record time because we were swerving in and out of trucks, budding into the opposite lane, the whole time. As we hopped out of the bus onto the grasslands, we were greeted by people dressed in traditional (Inner?) Mongolian attire atop their jeans and Nike sweatpants. When that was over, we quickly dropped our luggage off in our respective yurts and headed to the pig pile of horses so we could take a tour of the grasslands on horseback. Our tour consisted of view after view of semi-grassy plains, a stone yurt, an attacking goat, a “lake” that resembled more of a puddle and Swan Lake, which much to our dismay, was dried up. Yay Nei Menggu!
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