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After another few days of trying and failing to understand the Dream of the Red Chamber, we were fortunate enough to be given a day's holiday for the Mid-Autumn Festival on Thursday 19th, providing us with a four-day weekend. What better way to spend this time than in a yurt in the Inner Mongolian grasslands?
As is always the case in such a highly-populated country, buying tickets was a challenge and we ended up getting a hard-seat return to Hohot (the capital of Inner Mongolia). However, when we actually looked at the ticket itself, it turned out to be a hard sleeper, despite what the salesperson had said (and since hard seats are absolute hell in China, there was much rejoicing).
The night before our early train we had an all-you-can-eat sushi meal (88 kuai each and very good quality) with all the students from other UK unis, followed by a night out. Freddie, who had been planning an all-nighter, unsurprisingly conked out by 2am, showing more feminity than a Dan actor in Beijing Opera.
After two and a half hours of sleep, we made our way to Beijing East train station, where we met Coirle, Chloe and Clio (also known as the Three Cs). Charly and Lucy would take a later train, which was fortunate since Lucy seemed to be on her way to a club very early in the morning, last I'd seen her.
Words cannot describe how much more manageable a Chinese train journey is with beds. One of my most painful memories of travelling in China last year was a journey Freddie and I took from Xi'an to Pingyao. Since we were sitting in seats next to one another, we decided to organise a rota: every hour, one of us would stretch out on both of our seats and sleep, whilst the other would sit on the metal floor of the smoking area between the carriages. This worked for about four hours - I spend my time in the smoking area struggling to breath, reading William Maugham's accounts of China and watching the man sitting opposite me eating his way through hundreds of melon seeds. Fortunately, our trip to Hohot was a different experience - as soon as I found my berth, I slept peacefully for hours.
When I woke up, I realised I had forgotten to bring a book to pass the time - the only ebooks on my tablet were Morrison's Classical Chinese dictionary and 'Dream of the Red Chamber' in English. When the latter turned out to be equally incomprehensible in English, boredom drove me into making attempts at editing photos of the Chinese countryside, combining characters from Morrison's dictionary with the landscape (for a while, we could see the Great Wall along the horizon!). The result was a very pretentious, heavily-edited, pseudo-artistic image which I have posted on my tumblr, where I will now be uploading photos throughout the year. Stay tuned: www.christophmurphy.tumblr.com
When we arrived it was already dark, but judging from what we could see, there was nothing special-looking about the city. One difference I did notice between Hohot and most Chinese cities was, of course, the bilingual shop signs, which had both Chinese and Mongolian. Although I had encountered Mongolians back in 2011 in the Russian city of Ulan Ude, the difference in China was that they still wrote in traditional Mongolian script ( ᠮᠣᠨᠭᠭᠣᠯ ᠬᠡᠯ ) as opposed to the Russian Cyrillic alphabet (Монгол бичиг). However, most shop signs were still only in Chinese and everywhere we went, much Mandarin was being spoken.
As the taxi brought us to the hotel, fire crackers were going off all around - we then realised it was the day of the Mid-Autumn Festival, the very reason for our holiday! After we arrived, the hostel owners invited us to celebrate with them by making traditional Chinese dumplings (饺子) together. Turns out this is not a natural talent of mine.
Still slightly hungry, we headed to a nearby restaurant, where we enjoyed some cow's stomach and a kind of Mongolian milk drink which turned out to be shockingly savoury.
We went to bed very soon after, as our coach out into the Mongolian Steppe was scheduled the next morning...
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