some notes on 内蒙古

The entire Stanford program minus one (22 people total) road-tripped up to Chengde and Inner Mongolia this past weekend.

The most interesting things to note from the trip -

• Some beautiful temples in Chengde, including the Buddhist Puning temple, built in 1755, and the Tibetan-style "Little Potala Palace," built in 1767.
  
  
  Puning temple complex
  
  
  Puning temple
  

Tibetan prayer flags outside Little Potala

Not the great wall, but a pretty good wall nonetheless

• A truly inedible vegetarian Buddhist dinner in Chengde, which consisted of about 10 types of fake meats - fake fish, fake chicken, fake shrimp, fake duck, fake eel, fake squid, fake pork with fake pork fat, and other creations of varying degrees of rubberyness and tastelessness.
  

Looks eeriely like real fish, huh?

• To make up for it, a delicious lamb dinner in Inner Mongolia, where we ate an entire lamb roasted on a spit, and where Pokey, Barry, and Rozi devoured the lamb legs like true carnivores.

• Horseback riding on the Inner Mongolian highlands through a duststorm.

My horse, about to ride into the duststorm

Protecting ourselves best as we could (aka with hoodies)

A little bit worse for the wear post-duststorm

• Nearly freezing in the 30/40-degree night in an unheated yurt in Inner Mongolia - we ended up piling 15 people into one yurt (meant to sleep two) to huddle on the two pushed-together beds and play card games late into the night. It worked; we certainly stayed warm while we were there. Leaving that yurt, on the other hand....
  
  
  Tracy is clearly too tall for the door in our yurt
  
  I am cold
  

Anyway, it was wonderful spending two days under pollution-free skies, and we are now back in Beijing. Finals coming up soon. Then home.