It’s been a while… I have so much to talk about!

Things have been so crazy on this trip that it’s hard to find time to sit down and write about it.  I’ll try to give you all the short version.

First off, there’s Mongolia.  We had a week off of classes during China’s Golden Week holiday, and a group of six of us took the train to Ulaan Baatar for four days.  Mongolia was an interesting change – for one thing it’s much colder than Beijing, and it’s so much smaller of a town.  Mongolia has one of, if not the, lowest population densities of all countries on the planet, so even their capital city was a size comparable to Naperville.  A lot of people say it’s dirty and ugly, but I thought it had its own charm.  There are very few tall buildings so you can see the mountains and the huge sky wherever you go, and I think it makes the city seem cozy and beautiful.

We went on a few day trips as well to see some of the gorgeous Mongolian countryside and to get an idea of the way Mongol nomad families live.  There are a lot of families who keep herd animals and live in traditional round tents called gers.  On one of the days we got to take a short tour of one of the national parks on horseback, which was quite fun as well.  Not to mention that I got to see camels and yaks!

I’m really glad that I got to take this extra trip in addition to seeing Beijing and Xi’an.  The more places I see, the more I want to go see more someday.  My study abroad experience has been amazing so far.

Since we’ve returned from Mongolia it’s been a little quieter but we’ve been gradually winding down our time in Beijing.  Classes and site visits have taken up a lot of my time.  They cut the total amount of time we take Chinese classes down a bit so I have more time to go visit some of the smaller attractions of Beijing.  We also had a group trip to see a Peking opera, which was fairly interesting but tailored to a Western audience so it wasn’t purely authentic.  I think that traditional Peking opera is really hard for Westerners to understand though, so it was a good introductory experience at any rate.

I can’t believe that our time in China is almost over.  We leave for Kyoto next Friday.  When we first got here I kept wishing that I could go home – I’ve never been so far away from family and friends for so long – but now the time has flown by and I don’t feel ready to leave Beijing yet.  There’s so much left of Chinese culture that I have yet to experience.  At any rate, I’ve still got a week to run around and see everything I want to see, and I’ll be sure to let you know any interesting things I find!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 21st, 2008 at 7:47 am and is filed under Beijing, China, Mongolia, Study Abroad, Ulaan Baatar. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response.