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At about six in the morning, I was woken by the sound of people getting up to see the sunrise over the Steppe. When I felt the cold air come through the door, I decided firmly against doing anything that involved getting out from under my duvets. When we were all getting up, around two hours later, Freddie discovered a giant spider on his blanket, and calmly pointed it out to everyone. This caused a general state of panic in the room, and Freddie decided to deal with the situation by swiftly and calmly rolling the blanket up and throwing it in the corner. The night before, I had noticed that it was possible to put your hand under the wall of the yurt and feel the grass. I went to sleep knowing that anything could crawl in.
Whilst we were waiting for the coach to take us back to Hohhot, we suddenly saw a pack of horses galloping along the horizon, in the most spectacular way. I scrambled for my tablet to capture it, but by the time I was ready, they'd all disappeared.
To make myself feel better, I spent the journey back making a similarly pretentious arty combination of Chinese landscape and Chinese characters. This time, I used several variations of the character for 'horse' pasted into the Mongolian grasslands. Have a look on my tumblr if you're at all curious: www.christophmurphy.tumblr.com
As we were driving away, we came across a local, whose appearance was typical of modern Mongolians in the countryside: leather jacket and sunglasses, riding on the back of a giant motorbike, whip in hand, herding about seven horses, all racing across the grassland.
The journey back was hornet-free, but our coach was laughing just as much as before. We spent our afternoon in Hohhot, looking around a street selling traditional Mongolian clothes and leather jackets (you can tell who's Mongolian or Han Chinese just by seeing whether they're wearing a leather jacket or not).
The next day we headed back in the late morning. We would have missed our train if our taxi driver hadn't driven in the bicycle lane. Just before our train left, we were still going through security. The female guard half-heartedly patting down Charly, looked up at her and dreamily said "真漂亮!" (really pretty!), her compliment holding us up further.
We just managed to catch the train. Thus began the first hard seat journey of our year abroad - only seven hours, which, as anyone who's done a hard-seat journey in China will tell you, is not a long time. It turned out we were fortunate to have hard seats at all - most people in the carriage had standing tickets and were crowding the aisle (not that surprising, since it was the weekend after the Mid-Autumn Festival). However, pushing past these throngs, I was suddenly confronted by a terrible situation: an old lady was sitting in my seat. This meant I had two options: either kicking her out of my seat and forcing her to stand for the entire journey, or sacrificing the seat I had paid for and standing for seven hours. Eventually, I showed the old lady my ticket in the politest possible way. Without showing the slightest resentment, she smiled and shared the seat of her friend opposite. The two of them were so small, that it didn't seem like I'd inconvenienced them that much. Feeling slightly less guilty, I finally sat down.
After a few hours, I heard another old lady sitting nearby repeatedly telling a girl my age "你的上帝是人造的!" (Your God is man-made!), then proceeding to rant about religion at great length. I later discovered that this girl was one of the increasing number of Chinese Christian converts, which this old lady didn't seem to appreciate.
Soon after, someone swapped seats with me, meaning I was in range of this tense conversation. Within a minute of finding out where I was from, the old lady challengingly asked me, "Do you believe in God?" Not wanting to take sides in such a heated debate, I looked up the word for 'agnostic' in my phone dictionary (不可知论者), which no one seemed to understand. Eventually I told them 'I haven't yet decided' and moved the conversation to topics that were less likely to excite or upset these two passengers.
I ended up spending the next few hours being grilled by a young Christian convert, a militant atheist old lady, her albino husband and another old lady whose seat I had stolen. When they saw me looking out the window, they asked whether the countryside was nicer in England or in China. I was fortunate enough to remember the Chinese for 'not necessarily,' impressing them with my tactful reply to such a potentially awkward question, as a result of which they described me as '很能说话 '(very able to talk). Sadly, this was an inaccurate compliment - these seven hours were the greatest test of my Chinese as of yet.
My inability to speak well then became evident when the unbelieving old lady's husband pointed at my friends, asking which one was my girlfriend. I tried to explain that my girlfriend was in Hong Kong, but ended up (through faulty Chinese) incorrectly saying that I hadn't seen my girlfriend for over a year, making them all feel sorry for me. Embarrassed, I changed the subject.
The same man asked me where I'd been in China and whether I'd seen the Terracotta Warriors. When I said that I had, he asked what I thought of it. Worried that the Terracotta Warriors were a great source of patriotism for him, I didn't tell him what I really thought - that most of the museum was really boring - so I told him I had found it interesting. In response, he laughed at me, "Really?! I thought it was terrible. I took one look and just left."
They then asked about life England: "How do you fund your university course?" "What kind of house do you live in?" "How many siblings do you have?" and "How does the UK government classify ethnic groups?" One question I didn't understand at first, until I looked it up in the dictionary and found the definition 'Eight-Nation Alliance.' I then realised they were bitterly asking me about the Boxer Rebellion, and what the modern English view of it was. I told them, "We don't think it was a good thing," and they seemed satisfied by this answer.
After a relatively smooth journey, we arrived safely back in Beijing. At this point, you're probably wondering why the title of this entry is 'Mongolia and India in a single Day.' After we got back, we had the pleasure of meeting up with our friend India who stayed with us for a week. She is the second visitor to have stayed here (the first being Julianna!). Sorry for any misunderstanding.
- comments
Big Fan The ghostly horses wondering into the distance, an ethereal haze cast over the Mongolian Steppe, and the dewy grass underfoot, all sounds very idyllic. Very much felt like I was there in this one. Heart-rending material.
Adam Gaynard Had us all riveted!
Bigger Fan * wandering * sound Don't tarnish Christoph's glorious prose with such slapdash English.