Mongolia..Day 1

Well folks, I got a few pictures on this bloc....Not all that I wanted because I still haven't figured this out yet. I will create a couple of them and try to be continuous. The order is a little out too as you probably will notice.

Thanks to the several of you who have written..It is nice to hear from you even if it is just a few lines to tell me how things are going...even in Riderville. Thanks Scott.

At present I am listening to firecrackers....at least I think they are firecrackers.

The trip to Mongolia

First off some of them are sideway because I forgot to right them at first. Turn your head. I will try to fix them up for the next blog.

The train station West in Beijing is about 4 blocks long. We took a taxi from our school and drove for about 1 1/2 hours through some tough traffic and it cost us 150 yuan....about 20 bucks spread over three people. That's the time from Chaplin to Regina. The picture of all the train arrival and departures...can you guess which one is ours....remember there no English showing on any of the walls telling what the hell to do.

We travelled overnight and reached Hothau in the morning and met our travel guide Allie. She got us through the 3 days. That was the scene coming out of the train station and we had about a 4 hour trip to the little village where we bunked into a yurt....these are the white buildings behind our foursome...very commercialized...we actually thought we might get into the old style ones...not so..so ours had showers (cold) and a western style bathroom and a tv with Chinese channels..this was a resort for the Chinese and on their holidays...you can see that the doors are a little low...so is the bathroom door which I cracked my head on in the middle of the night when I had to go......

Had a meal and then went out on our horseback ride into the grasslands....the horses are not all that big although the rest of the crew thought so....couldn't even get mine to gallop..so you know the kind of a trot that these little buggers have....choppy...not so comfortable with the kind of saddles that they had....view is much like around Medicine Hat or Maple Creek....apparently in the summer there is a lot of green grass but we were there in the fall so it was the yellow that we would normally see....they had a shrine out there and the little girl was doing some maintenance on it...her mother was close by...Jennifer posed for my shot with the cart and horses behind



The horse were tied to a make shift hitching post out in the middle of the grasslands and we went in for tea and candy.

Came back in and the locals staged a Mongolian horse race and then we got a touch of rain. We wanted to see the wrestling but before we found it, after it was announced, it was over. At night they entertained us with some of the locals in costume doing songs and dance.

The funniest part of the day came after the display....we were invited to the bar....I will see if I can get some pictures...it was quite a nice little bar in the middle of the place...my camera had issues with batteries so I don't have any on my camera but the others do. Of course the locals were trying to impress the ladies..even to the point of asking them for a dance...and serenading them.....Jennifer especially...well after a while it was silly....so she began to tell them off and they couldn't understand anything she was saying...as much as we couldn't understand what they were saying......and I laughed so hard I could hardly drink my beer......when we finally headed back to the compound where we were staying, the guards made some remark and just as we couldn't understand what they said....Jennifer said...I can't understand a thing that you are saying..... so whatever!!!!!!




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