hello from hohhot

hello from hohhot, china, the capital of inner mongolia! i just arrived here very early this morning after a very nice trip with zach's family (sans zach) in beijing. i will write more on both later once i get my pictures loaded, etc. a few things i have noticed so far after a day in hohhot-

i have never had anyone in china correctly identify me as an american except for here. maybe they think all foreigners are american? the first time, i was in a taxi and the guy called in to his walkie talkie thing and told someone that he had an american in his cab. i laughed, so then he sheepishly turned around and confirmed it with me, and told me that i had good chinese lol. the other time, a little girl was like, 'look mom, an american!'. i kind of miss how so many people in dalian ask me where i'm from though :(

the people here are pretty chill. i walked down a quasi tourist street outside a temple i went to and all the vendors were just sitting there calmly as people were walking by. i just got the occasional 'hello!' accompanied by giggles. this also held true if i walked into a shop, which was quite refreshing after being mobbed by vendors in beijing! they were selling tiger and leopard fur?

the staring here is worse than other cities i've been to. i think the foreign population must be very, very small here. some people literally stop in their tracks!

besides the taxi drivers, the people here seem to freak out when i try to speak to them in chinese. it's pretty annoying. i think it reduces their comprehension of me by about 50%. i know it is at least partly mental now because in beijing people understood me way better than i have ever experienced before, and the taxi drivers here don't seem to have a problem if i am making sense.


when i was walking today a lady stopped me and asked me something. i couldn't really understand her at first, and then i realized that she was asking me about whether some building was a hotel or not. i guess i do appear like someone who would be staying in a hotel, but seriously she just stopped me and started speaking chinese, i'm surprised she assumed that i would understand. besides the employees in the hostel i'm staying at tonight, it seems like most people's english here is poor to non-existent. i stayed in a fairly expensive hotel the night before (poor planning on my part forced me to do this) and the employees there spoke no english besides the words 'right' and 'left'. i guess they don't have many foreign guests...

they have undercover/fake cops here?? after i exited a temple i was holding my travel book and looking around like a big tourist trying to figure out where i was. i saw a guy in a blue dress shirt take note of me, and eventually he walked over to me and pulled out a laminated card that had a bunch of chinese on it and in big letters said CHINA COP. shady, but i asked him where this street was and he pointed me in the right direction and that was that.

there is a greater variety in ethnic appearance here, and i even saw some guys with pretty long hair! this is the first time i have seen guys with long hair in china. they all seem to like to keep it pretty short. guy with slightly interesting hair the first picture. he was a cowboy guy in the grasslands.

the buddhist temple i went to here is one of the coolest one i have been to in china. it sort of reminded me of the wats i went to in bangkok. the temple was super colorful and had really cool murals on the walls. the main part of the temple was said to be heavily influenced by tibetan architecture.
i went to a tibetan restaurant and had DELICIOUS tibetan tea. if i don't make it to tibet, i'm at least grateful that i got to taste this. i'm not sure if it was their famous butter tea but it was a hearty, thick tea (but definitely not too thick) that tasted like it was made from nuts. as cracked out as the waiter was trying to deal with me, i'm glad he at least had the sense to point me to the tea section on the menu. i also ate a yak dish, which was prepared well and tasted very good, but didn't compare to the tea. it kind of just tasted like beef. the waiter probably had a good laugh about me- i didn't know how to say yak in chinese so i just pointed to a picture of a yak in menu and told him 'i want to eat this animal' lol. i realized later that probably like 90% of the meat dishes on the menu had yak in it.

some people here speak in some really strange mandarin dialect, because they only sound like they're speaking chinese half the time. i think it's a mongolian dialect. they have most of the signs translated into mongolian. look how crazy the script is!