Inner Mongolia

        So Garett knows people from his home ward in Idaho who live in Inner Mongolia, so obviously we needed to visit them. Everyone in China gets a week off of everything during the firstish week of October for National Week, which is basically their 4^th of July. So Garett, Eben, and I packed up our backpacks and headed up to Inner Mongolia.

         At the airport, our gate was in the basement. When it was time for boarding, us and 40 other people get on a bus to head out to our plane. This was maybe the smallest plane I have ever seen. I was too tall for the plane and it had two seats in rows on the right and one seat on the right. Good thing I’m not claustrophobic or I might have died. People were all looking at us weird because they couldn’t figure out why Americans would want to go to Inner Mongolia. And frankly we didn’t know what we were doing there either. Most people there looked like they really didn’t want to go. Like they were going to visit their crazy extended family for a week or something.

         <<Minorities are constantly being discriminated against in China. It’s a real problem. So most people were confused as to why we’d want to go to a place that is basically Mongolian and full of minorities. During National Week every tourist area is packed full of waves and waves of people, Mongolia on the other hand is not, because absolutely no one would ever want to go there it was another reason why we went.>>

         After a scary two-hour flight full of constant questions as to whether or not we were going to survive the trip we landed in Ordos. (Also, the airline was still under the impression that all electronics had to be turned off. Airplane mode was not a concept they grasped. We really should have died on that plane). Probably the coolest airport I’ve ever been to and also the smallest. The architecture was awesome and there were only14 gates, but there were Western toilets so I had nothing to complain about.

         <<Facts about Ordos. The Chinese government has dumped millions of dollars into making Ordos one of the faces of the new modern China. The city as it is seen today was only built in the last ten years. Ten years ago it was just a puny little village. It is one of the richest cities in all of China, as well as being one of the safest and cleanest. (Seeing as though we were thinking we were headed to some weird grassland crazy place—this was refreshing to hear). In the past three years the population has doubled and is up to about 100,000 people. It has a weird post-apocalypse vibe though because it’s a huge city built for millions, but since a lot of people don’t live there yet it is crazy empty. There are huge skyscrapers and malls that are completely empty and kind of creepy. But in a few years it will be busy and packed so that’ll be cool to see happen. It'll be great to be able to pull the "Original Hipster" card when it comes to traveling to Inner Mongolia. But there are basically no cars or traffic at all. Traffic lights are about 15 seconds long on average because there at most are 2 cars waiting to go. You could look down what seems to be a major road and only see one car and it’s four blocks down the road.>>